Dear Me, but I do love estate agents' pricing estimates. Gunnes, with apparently perfectly straight faces, have announced that the Blue Haven Hotel in Kinsale is expected to fetch £2.5 million. Two point five million pounds? Is that all? In that case, I'll take half-a-dozen please. Because anybody who knows Kinsale knows that the Blue Haven has for the past quarter f a century been its beating heart; and whoever has the good fortune to buy it - and if a pub on Main Street in Swords can fetch £2.2 million, as one did the other day, the lucky acquirer of the Blue Haven will be handing over rather more than just £300,000-above that price for it -is purchasing not just a hotel but an institution, a culture and a unique tradition of inn-keeping hospitality.
Now it is a well-known fact that anyone who goes into the catering and hotel business is certifiably insane. There are entire wings of psychiatric hospitals filled with hotel managers, waiters and chefs, sticking straws in their hair and insisting that they are Pope Bonaparte the First. An adolescent's stated wish to serve the public is a sign of a grave disorder which should merit instant electricshock treatment and the liberal use of a fire-hose or a rubber cosh. No court in the land will convict a parent for banishing to the attic a child who professes a desire to enter the catering business and keeping the wretch there for a year or two until the madness has passed.
Mental breakdown
For there is no career so certain to bring about mental breakdown as running a hotel. There is no career in which the public either feels it knows as much as the professional or resolutely declines to speak the truth. Surveys have shown that 10 per cent of the people who enter a restaurant do not know the difference between vanilla ice-cream and a bowl of spinach. Twelve per cent think that vin rouge is blusher in a Hi-Ace. Fifteen per cent of people will complain if they are given precisely what they ask for. Sixty per cent of people who are dissatisfied, when asked by the restaurant manager (who needs to know if there are problems) if everything is all right, will carol enthusiastically, "Yes, wonderful!" - and then, of course, bitterly complain to their friends. Furthermore, some 35 per cent of people use a restaurant lavatory with the accuracy of a herd of wildebeest on the Serengeti.
Yet there it is: people enter the catering business, year after year after year, for reasons I do not begin to understand. I would rather be an underwater welder on an oil-rig during a hurricane on the North Sea in December than have to serve breakfast to perfect strangers and, worst of all, be polite to them rather than obey the perfectly natural instinct to pour porridge all over them and crawl back to bed.
Enthusiasm
I am not alone in this regard. There are many people working in the service sector in Ireland who are as emotionally and temperamentally equipped for that line of work as vegans are suited to be bullfighters. One of the great features of the Blue Haven, and Kinsale generally, is the culture of enthusiasm among the workforce for their jobs. One never encounters there that dear familiar in Dublin, the bored and yawning waitress gazing at her watch and avoiding your eye as feverishly as a bluebottle dodging a flyswatter.
Nobody has been more fitted for hotel life than Brian and Anne Cronin, who have been running the Blue Haven for the past 25 years, and their righthand woman, Margaret Kelly, whom the gods protect. She is not for sale with the property; the Sultan of Brunei could not afford to buy it if she were. Instead she is now running the Kinsale College of Catering; no better person and no better place for such an institution. It cannot be said that money has improved our manners; and instead of courtesy being natural, as once it was, and not so long ago either, it must now be learnt. Kinsale and its great establishments - the Blue Haven, Actons, Man Friday, Max's Wine Bar, the Vintage, the Cottage Loft, Jim Edwards and the other members of the Kinsale Good Food Circle - became successful when we had not lost our natural mannerliness. They combined efficiency and culinary seriousness with native amiability; and that was what made Kinsale shine like a beacon across what was otherwise a desert of cremated meats and vegetables which had been boiled to within an inch of their sorry and wretched lives.
Our food might have improved in recent years (though it is nowhere near as good as we make out); but our manners seem to have deserted us entirely in even the most routine areas. Hold a door open for someone, a young woman in particular, and you will be very lucky to get even a nod, never mind a thank-you.
Mannerliness
But in Kinsale, they have not lost that courtesy and charm which makes the town such a pleasure to go. It is three years since I was last in the Blue Haven, and it had been modernised beyond description from the hotel I first stayed in 20 years ago. But it had retained all the mannerliness of that distant time, with the matchless Cronin-Kelly efficiency as all-embracing as ever.
Whoever buys the Blue Haven will be acquiring not just a hotel but a wealth of good will too. Ownership of such a place is more than a question of running a hotel, for it is one of the great institutions of Irish tourism. There are other fine hotels and boarding-houses in Kinsale; but the Blue Haven is the flagship. For it is more than an inn; it is now part of the national treasures. It stands high in public affection. The new owners must guard it and its reputation well. The Cronins and their splendid staff have set the highest standards to follow.
They have done moderately well out of it, and they deserve to. But more than that, we have all benefitted from the culture of endeavour, enterprise and excellence they introduced and maintained. Thank you.