Book early to avoid dissapointment

I hesitate to say this but maybe there’s some good to come out of this recession thingy.

For a start, we’re going to end up with a nice balanced economy where the Chancellor no longer puts his mail, still unopened in its envelopes, behind the mantelpiece clock. Where he’s no longer nervous to go to the cash machine of the Westminster branch of the Bank of England and ask for a mini statement because he thinks the machine may eat his government-issued card. When he’ll no longer avoid phone calls from his creditors – ok that’s a long shot. After all, there are 60 million of us. And politicians do tend to have an innate ability to ignore the electorate.

Yes, it’s good to know that our suffering will make life better for those in one of the professions that put us into a mess in the first place.

Maybe this wave of rationality will, by a form of osmosis, transfer itself from central to local government and good practices and planning will mean that we’ll find that we’ll have enough salt in the bank to cope with an icy winter, that our public servants concentrate more on serving than social engineering and the traffic wardens will leave us alone.

But the actual good thing to come out of all this is maybe that we, the general population, the proletariat, have realised that we are the ones that have to plan; to never let ourselves be so exposed to the failings of those we’d like to trust. And therefore to be so much more careful and realistic than those we elect to run the joint. And that we have to think ahead and do things properly.

It certainly seems to be the case as far as our restaurant business is concerned. It always surprises me that others manage to book next year’s wedding anniversary this year. That people book for Christmas before the summer is over. But this year we’re finding that Christmas is getting booked up faster than we’ve ever known. And we’ve already got a number of bookings for Durham University’s next graduation. That’s June in 2011 for goodness sake. I’m lucky if I can think into next week.

I’ve heard that there are more people paying as much off their mortgage as possible than ever before. Do you think that subliminally we’re all assuming that things are going to get worse? Maybe we are. But I remain a perpetual optimist and believe that we should, God willing, pull ourselves out of this mess and find ourselves in a better position than before; not necessarily richer or better off but with an economy no longer built on sand, with a general common sense affecting us all.

And if that means that our customers want to book up with us far into the future, well that can’t be a bad thing. Now, I must find a banker to thank.

October 2010