Good evening from the Victoria Inn

Good evening blog readers and what I thought was going to be a straight forward normal Sunday evening blog write is anything but as the B*****ds at Google have changed the way you add text and photo's and not told me!!! Hence this is my third attempt and as for photo's?? Well, that's going to be more luck than judgement and all because I have got a new camera and lots of pics to show you!! Growl.............   Why change things when they're working so well......... I just don't get it! And I don't like it either!

OK - moving swiftly on - otherwise you'll think I'm auditioning for Grumpy Old Women! No thank you, I am not quite one of those just yet but I'm sure getting close! 

Firstly, have you seen anything of two great TV programmes on recently - Mary Portas and Michel Roux? Both about customer service in their own way and both quite fabulous! 

Mary shows customer service at its worst and how she would put things right and Michel Roux has taken a bunch of kids who've barely been in any thing other than McDonalds and turned them into good waiting staff with some showing signs of a great career in hospitality.  But he's done it in such a lovely way - no hysterics, no Mr Ramsey swearing episodes and I think even I learnt a lot from the series - and even though I think we're great at customer service here at the Victoria I'm going to try to put some of his ideas in action.  I started today with talking to a customer about Champagnes and then taking a glass to the table (we sell it individually) and going back to check she was happy etc ( ala Michel Roux's sommelier) and really enjoying doing it all a bit more fully! I've even got staff enthused about a different kind of customer 'experience' so watch out for some changes!!

Also I have a new camera thanks to SOH, so I've been out and about happily snapping away....... whether I can get them loaded on here is a different matter tonight! So here goes..........Ah - now I have to load the photos on to the net to load them on to the blog! Ah well - I have  nothing else to be doing..... so then, here are some of my first offerings!    

The gentleman here is Mr Smith MBE - known to all as Smee! He had a very prestigious Lifeboat career here in Salcombe and is a thoroughly nice man - photo taken obviously in the Victoria Inn bar. Great character and it was him who supplied the tractor for our wedding.  The scenic one is of Salcombe 'bar' this week, the entrance to the Estuary - very wet, very windy, very wild and fantastic - Salcombe at it's best as far as I'm concerned. Lastly our little dogs: Rosie and Archie, both under 18 months and harder work than any child alone!! But we love them to death!  The photo at the top is of our great sign outside the pub.  

That's it for tonight - putting those 4 photo's on has taken me the best part of 30 minutes, loss of temper, a bar of chocolate and a glass of wine!!!! Hopefully next time will be easier.......................Night night all. X