If the PC brigade could have their miserable way I bet you they would outlaw the word Christmas and have it stricken from the dictionary…

I don’t know what it is with the way the UK is going but these days this nation seems to specialise in miserable gits who have no brains but plenty of useless qualifications from socialist universities.

And Christmas always seems to bring them out of the woodwork…

A children’s choir was forced to pull out of a Christmas concert in Corringham because ‘organisers’ decided their carols were ‘too religious’. Well, you see, the PC Pricks have redubbed this event a ‘Winter Festivity’ - not a Christmas concert. Tough luck for all those kids who had been rehearsing for nearly two months. Name me one carol that is not religious in some form…

And in Dorset the Rev Stephen Coulter has banned his parish from singing ‘Oh little town of Bethlehem’ because he feels that the carol does not represent what the actual Bethlehem is like these days. I suggest all the parishioners stand outside his house and sing the song until it drives him batty…

And finally – there’s always one of these killjoys – a teacher at Blackshaw Lane Primary School in Manchester happily told a class of seven year olds that Santa does not exist. Result…? a bunch of crying, upset kids right before Christmas and some very angry parents.

What a partygirl she is eh…? but, that’s what being PC is all about – shattering one of the few delightful aspects of childhood that most of our kids still enjoy…

So a job well done. I hope Santa decides her chimney is not ‘health and safety’ issue and bypasses her house.

As we enter the final weeks of our (almost) five years of being in the hotel trade I have been re-filing all the reservation forms and invoices we have collected over that time. As the number of guests we have had number into the thousands I had mixed emotions as I re-read many of their booking enquiries.

You wouldn’t think you’d recall any faces out of all those people but I happen to remember just about all of them…and this is where the ‘mixed emotions’ come into it.

Some I remember with great fondness, some I never wanted to see ever again and those few that still stay in touch even though they didn’t travel by this way again. They are a few but they are a nice few all the same – the family of six from Co Sligo in Ireland, the family from the Outer Banks region of North Carolina in the US and a very eccentric couple from over Provence way.

You really do meet all kinds in this business – there were those who thought we were great hosts and there were those who slammed the door as they left. There were those who looked down their noses at whatever we did for them…and those who considered our humble abode as idyllic (two guys from Bombay in particular…)

We knew when we started out here that it was not always going to be roses – but I’d say, in hindsight, that the roses out numbered the thorns…