Tales From A Harrogate Caravan
Chapter 14 — The Sunday Catastrophe
← Karl Swainston / Tales From A Harrogate Caravan
The woman was on the hard side of sixty, but she still maintained that smile of fun and youth and wasn’t at all troubled, and she carried with her a sort of elegant charm.
‘Can I sit down here?’ and she pointed to the empty portion of the bench. ‘You see all these people leaving,’ and indeed they were. ‘Well, they are all your customers of the present, but I doubt if many will be customers of the future.’
‘What has happened?’
‘You ask me what has happened, and you’re the owner? That’s not a good thing. Have you been in this type of business long?’
There was no need to lie to the inquisitive but pleasant lady, and I told her the truth of my part in the business.
She listened with utmost attention, and when I had finished, she spoke: ‘Customers there, everywhere, have been waiting for well over an hour and a half for food, and they still haven’t been fed. If you want your business to survive, you mustn’t sit on the back seat and hope everything will be fine. You must make sure things are fine, and you mustn’t let this happen again, as I can hear the knell for the place if you do. I suggest you go into the kitchen and find out what has happened and bring a remedy to the situation as quickly as you can if you want this wonderful place to survive. I know a great many of those leaving won’t return, but I shall, as I want to see you and this place do well, and you take my advice because I own restaurants in London and know what I’m talking about.’
The wise old lady then left, and I sat for some moments in the autumnal sun beneath the tree, watching disgruntled customers trudge off home. A second or two passed before I jumped up and headed for the kitchen to find out what the catastrophe had been.
The pub and restaurant were almost deserted now after the mass exit of customers, and only a couple of the locals, smirking, looked at the devastation of events. In the kitchen, they’d all but given up and all looked shattered and ashamed.
‘Don’t ask!’ screamed Lorraine, and she pushed past me on her way to the bar for another gin.
I never did get any answers that day as to what had brought about such a suicidal conclusion, and it was only after the elapse of a few days and the eking out of people did I finally find out what had occurred. Two points caused the catastrophe:
No one bothered to check the weather for that beautiful Sunday and came to the conclusion that the pub had every chance of being packed out. No one bothered to check whether there were enough food reserves for even a typical busy Sunday and that all the reserves were planned and prepared well in advance.
These were basic prerequisites that anyone in a kitchen would check upon. In the Arms’ kitchen that day, experience and qualifications included two – not one, but two – chefs, a deputy restaurant manager, and a hotel manager. All this wealth of talent, and they simply ran out of food because none of them did the basics.
Some may castigate me for not being involved, and that I should have been involved, but my role was clear from the outset: I was not to interfere with the operations of the business, and besides, I had utmost trust in Lorraine and her staff, then, at that time.
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About Karl Swainston
Karl Swainston is a writer and storyteller whose work is forged from a life lived across the North of England and far beyond. Growing up on a Leeds council estate in the 1960s, Karl's journey was anything but linear. By the age of thirty, he had already lived a dozen lives: from the rigors of grammar school to a degree in Latin, a stint as a fishmonger, a period of discovery living in Marseille, and a return to the hustle of London. Whether working as a postman, a builder, or competing as a county-level chess player, he was, above all, an avid reader—constantly documenting the world around him. This restless spirit continued into his professional life. Karl later taught in Bradford, where he ran a specialist unit for 244 of the most excluded students from across the region—young people whom even the local Pupil Referral Units could not accommodate. Working alongside his old friend Malcolm, Karl spent his days navigating the volatility of Bradford's most aggressive and dysfunctional teenagers. Throughout his life, Karl has been an avid runner and has always shared his home with a rotating cast of beloved dogs and cats—companions who have been constant witnesses to his work. As a writer, Karl's range is as expansive as his history. He works across a wide breadth of genres, including fiction and short stories, autobiography and memoir, biography, non-fiction, and metaphysical writing, as well as providing sharp commentary, opinion, analysis, and essays. Whether writing about his years managing the Harrogate Arms or offering insights from his current adopted home in South East India, where he lives in a simple village with his dog, Bambi, Karl's voice reflects the full, untidy, and deeply human breadth of life. He continues to draw on the rich, decades-long tapestry of his experiences to tell stories that matter, proving that no matter where you live, the human story remains the same.
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