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When I was a child, I used to go on vacation with my family to a little place on the coast in south-east England.

I tend to look back on that time with rose-tinted spectacles. I could swear the summers were longer and warmer, the rain less frequent, the ice-creams more flavoursome.

What I am sure about is that two communication activities I used to enjoy have all but disappeared in this age of text, mobile and World Wide Web. I’m talking about sending messages in bottles and on holiday postcards.

To a child, the message-in-a-bottle has always seemed a romantic concept, imagining as he does that it will turn up on the secluded shore of some remote desert island when in reality it usually comes back on the next tide to be smashed on the sea wall.

When I was researching this subject a few years ago, I was intrigued to read the story of a lonely British teenager called Beryl Edwards who propelled her message-in-a-bottle into the English Channel in 1954. Thirty-three years later, a family in Holland found the note and wrote to her. I imagine that if you were looking for a pen-friend nowadays, you’d go to findapenfriend.com and all correspondence would be conducted through a PC.

And who sends a holiday postcard now that you can upload pictures and text by mobile phone and e-mail? Gone is the delight of trying to think up something witty to say in the limited space available and of receiving a card from Italy or Spain when the sender has already been back at work for a fortnight.

I recently discovered that writing on a holiday postcard is a science. I kid you not, dear reader, an eminent professor wrote a thesis on it. I quote: “The holiday postcard is an important genre in tourist culture and the language used in postcard texts reveals significant information about the attitude of senders and recipients towards each other and towards the activities they engage in and the events they experience. I have suggested that positive evaluation is the motivation underlying the creation of the text for reasons of power and politeness and that evaluation is centred around a contrast between the holiday as an ideal and the reality of everyday life.”

Wow! All that in ‘Wish You Were Here.’

by Andy Moreton

I spent a day in August in a little town in south Devon called Totnes, about 200 miles from my home on the outskirts of London. In the high street, I literally bumped into someone I knew.

That coincidence brought to mind an extraordinary incident that happened in the summer of 1990. My family and I were in Gozo, an island in the Maltese archipelago. You have to understand that the place is about the size of Manhattan and quite remote: to get there, you fly to Malta, get a cab to the docks and jump on a ferry.

We were in a vast house with no radio or TV, but a supply of newspapers left by the previous occupants. One evening in an old Sunday paper, I read a feature written by someone I’d worked with ten years previously and mentioned this to my wife.

The following morning, we were booked on a boat trip to a local beauty spot and at the back of the boat I saw … yup, you guessed it - Martin, the man I’d spoken of the previous evening.

I was so disbelieving that I didn’t introduce myself at first, but as we swam close to each other in the Blue Lagoon he said: “You’re Andy Moreton, aren’t you - we used to work together ten years ago.” We joined his family for tea at their rented farmhouse the next day to talk over old times. He’d written one novel and was working on a second.

There’s a sad end to this story. Some time later, Martin contracted a rare form of cancer and wrote about it humorously and movingly in his national newspaper column. He died in 1996, aged 44.

by Andy Moreton

Hotels that feature on www.luxique.com are of the highest quality – our expert team make sure of that; hotel staff will do their utmost to make everything as you wish it to be.

There is one bugbear, however, that can’t be predicted – noisy neighbors. In a survey last August in the leading British paper, The Sunday Times, this came out top of the annoyances that could turn a holiday sour.

A few years ago, I booked into a hotel on the Spanish island of Majorca in the hope of a quiet week in the sun.

Towards the end of my first night, I had a rude awakening. At 5am, through the thin wall linking my room to the next, came the sound of a telephone ringing, followed by a long, loud and animated conversation in a language not my own.

The door to the room was closed noisily and silence reigned for about an hour. The two occupants returned, there was more loud conversation and then all was quiet
again. The following day, the same pattern.

On the third day, I decided to investigate. I secretly followed the two ladies through the dining room and past the terrace to the swimming pool where they carefully laid towels on two sunbeds. Contented, they enjoyed a hearty breakfast and then returned to bed.

The following morning, tired and tetchy, I decided to exact some small revenge. I tracked them once more (by now I was becoming quite good at ducking behind the potted plants) and, as they sat down to breakfast, I removed their towels and put them in a rather obscure place. When they’d returned to their beds, I reversed the door sign from ‘Do Not Disturb’ to ‘Please Make Up My Room,’ and rang the room from the lobby leaving it off the hook.

I am not proud of my actions, dear reader. I could simply have reported them to the hotel manager, but believe me my modus operandi gave me far more satisfaction.

by Andy Moreton

The English writer, William Somerset Maugham, once wrote: “American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”

These days more and more women and men, American and English, are finding a personal butler can add a little something extra in their hotel suites and cruise ship cabins. From the routine to outlandish, they are at their guests’ beck and call.

A friend and his wife just had a once-in-a-lifetime stay in a luxury hotel penthouse suite in south Florida.

“Did you get a butler?” I asked eagerly when they returned.

“Nothing so vulgar,” said my friend’s wife, “we had a personal assistant.”

“What did he do?” I pressed.

“Just about anything we asked,” said my friend.

“But didn’t he … sort of … you know … get in the way?”

“Oh no, discretion personified.”

The various butler schools around the world say the ideal ‘Jeeves’ should have excellent social and communication skills; good manners and etiquette; organisational and management skills; initiative, dependability, and good judgement;
diplomacy, tact and discretion and a good knowledge of wines, spirits and food.

Or, as Hugh Hefner’s English butler, William Smith, put it: “A good butler anticipates what a person needs before he knew he needed it.”

by Andy Moreton

Being in the boutique hotel business, we’re often asked: ‘What exactly is a boutique hotel?’ Good question.

One dictionary definition says: ‘an intimate, usually luxurious or quirky hotel environment which differs from a larger chain or branded hotel by providing an exceptional and personalised level of accommodation, services and facilities.’

“A bit of a mouthful, but a pretty fair description,” says Alex Brey, Luxique’s Chief Exec. “What we look for in short is a mixture of style, design, service and location.”

It’s thought boutique hotels began to appear in the early 1980s. One of the first to open its doors to the public was The Blakes Hotel in South Kensington, London, designed by the internationally-renowned stylist and former actress, Anouska Hempel. Blakes boasts a reputation for protecting its clients from the prying lenses of the paparazzi so it’s a popular London base for film stars, musicians and designers.

Anouska Hempel now has a total of four hotels in her portfolio. She’s known for being a perfectionist, so is there any hotel in the world in which she feels totally comfortable (other than her own, of course)? “Al Bustan Palace; in Oman,” she says, “the service is extraordinary.”

Brey agrees it’s a jewel of a hotel. “Check out the atrium in the lobby,” he says, “ it’s quite stunning.”