Consulting Wolf

If you need a synonym, an antonym, or an idea for a rhyme, you consult Roget. Likewise for a cricketing statistic, Wisden; or in order to act like a nob rather than a knobhead, Debrett. Miscellaneous facts and figures: Whitaker. If you need a comprehensive selection of all the possibilities for vacational accommodation in these wonderful islands of ours, there is nothing similar, no obvious single point of reference to go to.

TripAdvisor, non-indigenous, sadly, is probably the best place to start. It gives the visitor’s perspective rather than that of the owner. While wrestling with it the other day, in need of modest hotel accommodation in the south of England, I came across a review headed “Watery Fowls”. Immediately I recognised this as 11/12ths of an anagram, visualised the white sign with the letters hanging off, heard the theme music, and even mentally re-enacted part of the infamous car-thrashing sequence. I’m sorry if I’ve been mildly obsessional about John Cleese lately, but he’s so relevant to modern life.

If Surrey and Sussex are anything to go by (and earlier experience tells me that Dorset and Devon are just as bad), an alarmingly high percentage of the small hotels and B&Bs in this country are run by people supernormally endowed with traits that include pomposity, stinginess and petty-mindedness.

There are of course many generous and helpful hosts, many fine establishments and many helpful and positive reviews. So many reviews, however, attest to the petty conceits, small-mindedness, paranoia, misanthropy, meanness, officiousness, greediness, innate desire to deceive, and downright weirdness of the owners of small time hostelries. Owners who want to charge absurd fees. Who use a wide angle lens to photograph a deformed broom cupboard named “The Marlborough Suite”. Who, lacking even that, can only illustrate their property with a picture of the Tower of London. Who offer fresh, organically grown water. Who can offer colour TV. Who want you to arrive at 5.15 precisely (so long as it isn’t Thursday, or July, or the day when Penelope has to go to the kennels), to pay upfront and, naturally, to wipe your feet.

Orwell said that all tobacconists were fascists; I don’t know what he would have made of hotel proprietors. The ones I allude to above belong to a class of people who flourish in English society – the sodoffcracy. Give us your money, don’t  bother us, and just …  go away. In the Age of Information there has to be a better way of avoiding them.

Rather than having to trudge (virtually) backwards and forwards between individual accommodation websites and TripAdvisor (or similar) reviews it might be more useful if there was a single printed volume, or more realistically, a website, in which all the exemplars of this unlovely species of national embarrassment could be concentrated. I propose that it be called Wolfs Twatery, and that, as anagrams go, it should score 12 out of 12.