Tee-Time for the Bewildered...

I live in a place where lots of people spend their holidays. As the Easter weekend approaches, so do the tourists, their people-carriers and their 4X4s loaded down with bags, cases and bikes, ready to double park at will and commandeer the best tables in every single café. But more than this: in a couple of months the town where I now live will be host to a major golf championship – the Irish Open. All around the area, roads are being resurfaced, derelict buildings are being painted or demolished, and local hotels and restaurants are being given frenzied makeovers. It reminds me of when I was a child, and had spent a day at home: I had probably managed to cause chaos in our small living room, with story books and colouring-in books and coloured pencils and teddy bears strewn everywhere. The terrible cry would go up: ‘Quick! There’s people coming! Get the place tidied up!’ and as my mum scuttled around flapping her hands and my dad put his newspaper away with ill-disguised bad humour, I’d have to tidy my books and terrible attempts at drawings into a neat pile and send the bears off to have a picnic in the cupboard under the stairs. On the north coast of Northern Ireland, it’s a bit like that on the grand scale. The visitors are coming and the place is in a mess.

With my own holidays from school just beginning, I agreed to meet a companion for lunch in a local establishment known for its good views. My companion has persuaded me not to name the establishment; I am allowed, it seems, only to refer to it as ‘a local establishment with regal connotations’. It must have the best setting of any such place locally, perched about 200ft above sea-level, overlooking a sweeping beach, outlying islands and a very famous golf course, with views stretching from Donegal to the West to Islay and the western Scottish coast if you turn to look to the west. It was an Irish spring day: brilliantly sunny, eye-wateringly cold. Perfect for some fine views and some bright chat over a light lunch. After all. If everywhere is getting ready for the Big Event at the end of June, then the Easter holiday is bound to be the time that local restaurants and cafes will do everything they can to make a good impression, in a trial-run kind of way.

Or that’s what I thought.

Walking in, I had a kind of sinking feeling, as I could see so many grey and white haired people in the distance, in the dining room. And yes: I use that word ‘dining room’ on purpose. This isn’t a sort of trendy, boutique hotel with a café-bar or a brasserie or a bistro. This is a traditional, family hotel with a dining room, a Sunday Carvery and teatime specials every day. Following my companion into the dining room and being waved vaguely in the direction of the one remaining window table which wasn’t being occupied by a brigade of the silver-haired fans of the lunchtime special, I spotted a large Easter Egg in a basket, bedecked by tiny yellow chicks, which was being raffled for the Samaritans. My sinking feeling redoubled…

Although all I really wanted was a sandwich and a cup of good coffee, my companion was hungry so we were presented with full menus. I have bruises on my ankles. Not because my companion is of a violent disposition; because I started to chuckle as I read the menu. Every cliché of the old-fashioned menu was there. Well almost. There was deep-fried brie, the starter that most people’s arteries have made them forget. There was a special ‘Meat’ section, which read like the inventory of the fridges in a butcher’s shop. My favourite item on the menu – and probably responsible for that particularly big bruise on my ankle – was the salad section. The salad section was an addendum to the ‘Meats’ menu: ‘Selection of fresh salad with your choice of cold meat: ham, chicken, beef, vegetarian’. It’s a long time since I’ve seen the vegetarian option listed under the heading ‘Meats’, and a whole new concept to consider that the vegetarian option is just that: carved, roast vegetarian with salad. My eye wandering idly through the other choices, my companion wandering off to interrogate the carvery – I chose the open sandwich. Ham, salad and wheaten bread. What could go wrong…?

Nothing, it turned out, that a sense of humour couldn’t fix. Sipping my Diet Coke (served with a side order of a jug of tap water), I surveyed the surroundings as I waited. Wallpaper the colour of the brown paper people use to send parcels in at Christmas-time. That typical hotel carpet: blue and red and pink and swirly. Those ubiquitous hotel chairs – gold frames, blue velour seats. Piped music: instrumental everything. The theme tune from ‘Inspector Morse’, the theme song from ‘Titanic’ (so appropriate overlooking a beach and some impressive cliffs), a couple of Beatles hits and something by Cliff Richard (a definite theme – those cliffs again!), played to within an inch of their lives and made to sound absolutely identical, by someone who had clearly just discovered the synthesizer. Probably circa 1984, which is probably when the CD was recorded…

My sandwich arrived. I looked, it seems, confused. I’m a bit of a prescriptivist, I’m told. When it comes to the important things in life, like grammar, coffee, good manners, personal hygiene and… er, sandwiches, I’m probably a bit old-fashioned. It’s probably what gives away that I’m really rather old, no matter how much I may like it when I’m mistaken for being much younger than I really am. I like things to be done right. A sandwich is something between two slices of bread (or a roll, or a croissant, or a wrap or… like, whatever… see, I do try to keep my attitude youthful…) An open sandwich is… well, something that is at least open to the idea, the concept, of being a sandwich. It’s a bit like a convertible car. It’s a sandwich with the top down. Except that this was an open sandwich which had taken its top down, then climbed out of the car and wandered off. It was a sandwich of which the filling seemed to want to have about as much to do with the advertised slice of wheaten bread as those two pandas in Edinburgh Zoo, who show no indication whatever of having any intention of mating, despite the persuasive tactics of their keepers. My companion was enjoying his ‘Norn Irn Man Special’ of steak, peppered sauce and chips. I was just… puzzled. Bemused. Bewildered. And then increasingly, amused. Examining the components of the salad (because salad this was – it was advertised as an open sandwich, but it was a ham salad with a bit of wheaten bread cut in half and slipped coyly onto the side of the plate), I soon realised that this was Norn Irn Salad circa 1976 – the Year of the Hot Summer when salads were, I think, introduced to the Northern Irish diet. Norn Irn salad is thus: a few slices of ham (cut a bit too thickly, like the ham you have at Christmas), with the fat left on; a few wedges of tomato, a couple of rounds of cucumber and just one big slice of red pepper to make it seem exotic, a hard boiled egg sliced down the middle so that it seems to glare at you rather balefully, and a dollop each of coleslaw, waldorf salad and potato salad, thickly encased in salad cream. Just to make sure you get your good Norn Irish fat ration. Oh, and some nondescript foliage for ‘greenery’, topped off with a big round of tinned pineapple. Not too much greenery, mind: you don’t want to offend anyone… Now: I’m not saying it wasn’t ok. It was just that, actually, I suppose – but it made me want to snigger and be cheeky and be small enough again for my feet not to reach the dining room floor, because it transported me back to a time I don’t really remember in an era which has probably defined me…

The thing is. The era of the Norn Irish Salad is one I want to forget. Nowadays, and as someone who pretty much lives on salad, I like the kind of artistically-presented salads that get their photos taken for the Waitrose Magazine. The sort of salads that M&S would say are ‘not just salads’. The sort of salads that the Health & Fitness app on my iPhone gives an approving nod to, as they’re devoid of dressings or salad creams and as low in calories as they are high in appetising colour. And with a major, high-profile event due in the area so soon, should local ‘dining rooms’ not be thinking about the kind of clientele they’re going to have when the cameras and the fans and the golfers all arrive? When it’s more a case of High Tee than High Tea? In that sunny but oh-so-brown dining room full of silver hair, there was no phone signal, no WiFi – I was mocked for my twitchiness as my iPhone sat silently, looking wistfully out the window, receiving no tweets, no texts, no emails, no nothing. There was no air-con: just about ok on a day with an icy north-easterly buffeting the dining room windows, but nevertheless making the room feel stuffy, what with the carvery and the creaking radiators and the sunshine. (And all those vegetarians slow-roasting in the kitchens, I suppose…) Surely the kind of visitors who come to the coast for the major events in the next few months will want something more sophisticated? Something approximating to at least 2002, if not 2012? Contemporary design, up-to-date menus, a bit less of the prawn cocktail / steak and chips / butterscotch-nut sundae (warning – made with nuts!), a bit less of the all you can eat carvery, do help yourself to more of the same…

Just before we left the dining room, the dreaded and inevitable tones of Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ rang out from the stereo. Except that it wasn’t ‘Tubular Bells’ as you’d expect to hear it, complete with the occasional sound of the advertised bells. It was an instrumental version – I know, I know, how do you do an instrumental version of a piece which is already instrumental? – played with gusto and not one interesting feature by that person who had clearly just discovered the synthesizer, back in 1984. It summed the whole experience up for me, as I walked, blinking, out of the sunlit dining room, my eyes watering, past the giant Easter egg being raffled on behalf of the Samaritans. When we go out for an evening, or for lunch, or for coffee, what we want is a better version of what we have at home. Going out for a light and simple lunch today, I was having a better version or what I’d normally have at work: a better view, calmer company, and no deadlines. If a café or a brasserie or a ‘dining room’ serves us up a reality from an era that we think best forgotten, it’s a bit like taking an interesting piece of music and removing all the distinguishing features of its score, homogenising it so that it becomes every bit as bland as the dull beiges of the world’s dullest wallpaper.

Until things like that change, maybe the entertainment experiences in this golfing resort are best described as being under par.