The Grand Bellweather, Where The Complaints Book Is Kept In A Locked Room For Its Own Safety

The Grand Bellweather presents itself, in its own literature, as a house of solutions. This is technically accurate. The Grand Bellweather has one solution, and it deploys it with the serene consistency of a lighthouse. Whatever you raise at the desk, whether the heating or the window or the ceiling, you will be handed a small laminated card and thanked for your patience before you have demonstrated any.

The card reads: Your comfort is our foremost concern. Beneath this, in a smaller font, is a telephone number. The number connects to the desk at which you are currently standing. We tried it, in the spirit of enquiry. The gentleman on duty answered, saw us, and we regarded one another across four feet of carpet with the mutual understanding of two people caught inside the same policy.

There is a complaints book. Its existence is confirmed on a brass plaque in the lobby, which we admired at length, it being the only object in the building that made a promise and kept it. The book itself lives in the manager's office. The manager's office is kept locked. The key is held by the manager, and the manager, we were told with genuine regret, works remotely.

We wrote instead to the address printed on the plaque. A reply arrived within ninety seconds and thanked us for contacting the Bellweather family of hotels, of which there is one. It invited us to raise the matter with the front desk at our earliest convenience. By that point we had developed a certain affection for the loop, in the way one does for weather.

None of this is the doing of the man on the desk, who has been issued a card, a telephone and no authority whatsoever, and who by Thursday had begun greeting us with an apology already in progress. We would like it recorded that he was the only functioning system in the building, and that he was operating well beyond his stated capacity.

On departure we asked, purely as a formality, whether any of it had been written down anywhere at all. He said that it had. He said everything goes in the book, without exception, and that this has been the policy for years and is followed to the letter. Then he glanced at the locked door behind him for slightly longer than the sentence required, and said that the book is very full.