​The Good
 
Sheffield’s Endcliffe Park witnessed a flypast this week, with thousands of people paying homage to ten US airman who died in February 1944, to save the lives of 83-year-old Tony Foulds and his friends who were playing in the park.
 
Returning home from a raid in Denmark, the damaged B17 aircraft was hoping to land in the park but upon seeing the children playing there, the choice was made to veer away, and the plane crashed into nearby woodland killing all on board. A memorial was built in 1969 and since, Tony has visited six days a week to polish the brass work and maintain the flowers. That is a whole mass of good.
 
Great White sharks could help us to beat cancer! Yes, not a wind up, nor sci-fi!  Scientists have discovered that the fish they have rapid healing and cancer-beating abilities in their DNA, which has developed over 500 million years!
 
The Bad
 
Aaron Campbell, the 16-year-old teenager who was found guilty of raping and murdering a six-year-old on the Isle of Bute, had previously told a friend he would like to kill someone, “just for the life experience”. He had a history of torturing cats and was obsessed with violent computer games. He’s not been sentenced yet, but prisoners tend not to look kindly on those guilty of crimes against children, so he’s having to be protected around the clock.
 
MP Angela Smith quit Labour in disgust at the Party’s anti-Semitic attitude under Jeremy Corbyn, but within hours was forced to apologise for a racist comment live on the BBC Two’s Politics Live. We really have got ourselves into a mess, even a police force has been found guilty of racial discrimination against a white heterosexual man. Is it time to take a breath? Yes, abuse of all forms is wrong, but people have to believe that; attitudes have to change.
 
The Mad
 
A parrot was seen looking lost at Dublin Airport… it could only happen in Ireland! The African Grey failed to respond to anything until it heard someone talking Slovak. We await the movie!
 
George Mendonsa, the man in the iconic photograph in Times Square, grabbing and snogging the nearest woman to him at the end of the First World War, was announced dead last week. The Iconic picture had a resurgence, but feminists complained it was sexual abuse! He’s in uniform, he’d been there so that 74 years later we had the freedom to criticise.

​The Good
 
My highlight of good news this week was hearing Glenn Hoddle survived after being declared officially dead for 60 seconds. We should all learn more about first aid; if it wasn’t for the engineer Simon Daniels having the knowledge he did and using it so effectively, Glenn would have died. I loved the quote that Glenn never thought he’d be grateful to have seven broken ribs!
 
More good news came in the form of the Government allocating £13m to improve our parks. We don’t make enough use of them. When I was a kid we were always in the park, although some would argue it was a different world back then, as there were not so many flats and more people had gardens. There were no TVs, mobile phones or game programmes, but that’s no excuse… let’s get back to using our parks!
 
The Bad
 
Boohoo.com has given in to lobbyists by saying it will ban the sale of woollen garments. Why is this bad? I’m not sure why natural wool which is a product of good animal husbandry should be banned! Surely man-made fabric must be ecologically worse, but let’s leave that aside. They don’t even sell woollen products anyway, so this is a pure PCPR stunt!
 
Since writing the above I see they have already backtracked on the ban… shocker!
 
Another bad…
 
I don’t care what gender, shape, size, colour, religion or age someone is, they are all just people to me and I’d feel abhorrence if I saw any abuse towards them.
 
I’ve always been proud of the British Army, but six white soldiers are reported as racially abusing a fellow soldier. Who is she? The Army’s diversity poster girl…
 
An extra category for an extra special guy, both bad, mad and sad!
 
To my generation, the ‘boys of 66’ will always be special. Football was different back then, going down to the park on a Sunday morning for a kick about was great fun!
 
It went beyond mad and all the way to bad that Bobby Moore wasn’t knighted until after his death. We give the honour to people who just do their job, often well of course, but that’s all they are doing.
 
In the current cult of celebrity honours, it’s so sad that the Englishman who played in the greatest ever England team and produced possibly the greatest save the world has ever seen was not better honoured. R.I.P Gordon Banks.
 
The mad
 
Actress Felicity Jones was told her teeth were too British for US film producers! Really?!
 
Athletes had to run to get a bandage after President Putin of Russia injured his finger in a judo match… no word on the other guy!

​The Good
 
I doubt my tuppence had any effect, but following on from my bad section of the blog last week about self-harming competitions, how great to see that the Government is cracking down on child protection online and that Instagram is also taking action.
 
I can hark on about many things in modern life and some, almost acrimoniously, say I do and often! Kids are taught how to sleep and be happy… yes, although I’d have laughed at that concept before I read a book called, The Magic Power of Your Mind, back in my early twenties.
 
I’m a positive person but it taught me mindfulness techniques and the huge value of breathing exercises. I go to sleep quickly and deeply and whilst some folk might have thought me mad talking to myself as I went to sleep during the first three months, I am now programmed! It works.
 
This has all been part of Children’s Mental Health Week (4th to 10th Feb). You can hear my interviews on mental health in this blog section.
 
Another good…
 
And we learn from Spain that a woman took part in the finals of the Spanish ham-slicing championships last week. She didn’t win, but what a great thing it was for her to be there.
 
The Bad
  
In truth, I wonder if this qualifies for bad or should actually be mad! A review by NHS Improvement has concluded that better time management would mean being able to carry out 290,000 more operations a year. Having worked for a very large company for 10 years before becoming an SME, I have spent the last 45 years espousing the essential need to manage time. Nationalised industries and the government sector are dire at it. You’d go bust in the SME world if you behaved like them, and we provide 60% of the jobs in this country.
Also…
Apparently, foreigners are cheating in the ‘Life in the UK Test’, which is part of their application for UK citizenship. Criminal gangs are offering as much as £2,000 to provide the answers via a hidden earpiece. The BBC reports that one woman, an EU national, told them she decided to cheat after failing first-time around, saying she "felt so much panic" about her situation.
Finally…
Is this just bad, or is it mad… or is it both? Rolf Harris was found looking through the windows of a school.
 
The Mad
 
I’m all in favour of people spending their hard-earnt cash as they like, but even so, who’d pay £2,700 for a 76-year-old part-smoked cigar!? It was kept as a souvenir by a naval officer on board HMS Pembroke in 1943. Apparently, it was part-smoked by Sir Winston Churchill, but I’m not sure how it can be authenticated… DNA maybe?
 
The whole story shows great initiative and foresight and is wonderfully British!
 
Another mad…
 
Wayne Rooney drunk with another barmaid in the US after an all-night bender. He just wanted someone to talk to about something that wasn’t football-related… the barmaid is reported as saying!
 
Locked up for seven hours and arrested in front of her children… her crime, calling a transwoman a man on Twitter, and now there’s a court order to stop her doing that. I thought the police had better things to do and suspect they think so as well.
 
If they’ve received a complaint, then they obviously have to investigate it… but there’s something wrong somewhere!

​It is said that everyone has a book in them, which having written four and been in the top 40, I can’t really disagree with! But I suspect that everyone in the hospitality industry also have some thoughts on TripAdvisor and other like-minded review sites!
 
Having been involved in hospitality for a decade, I certainly do. But I’ve been reticent to write about them for fear of backlash, which we know happens. And very fearful about putting those who maliciously condemn you in their place. You run the risk of more bogus bad reviews and of deterring new customers because they side with the reviewer, or just think, ‘why take the risk of going there?’
 
Of course, we don’t all see things in the same way and I recall once in my 4-star, 2-rosette restaurant visiting a couple’s table to ask if everything was alright. I had been eating with my wife, but had spoken and bantered with several regulars that evening before I got to their table and could see that they had both had the same main course.
 
‘No’, the lady said. ‘It was awful, I didn’t enjoy it all’. In what way I asked but before she could speak her husband (I assume her husband as they were both wearing wedding rings), jumped in and said, ‘mine was wonderful!’ ‘Well mine wasn’t’, she said. I’ve been around long enough to not get involved in my own domestics, let alone other peoples, so I discretely said I was sorry to hear she hadn’t enjoyed it and exited. A few days later there was a damning review which suggested I had made it worse and should go back to Hades where I belonged.
 
All I said in the reply was that I was sorry she felt like that and that the vast majority of our customers liked what we did.
 
I think that episode can probably be explained by something that was nothing to do with us or the food. It was not a try on; but they happen, and I’ll tell you about the most blatant one I experienced before I move on to the terrible treatment of staff at the Hobgoblin in Bristol.
 
It was a Saturday and my wife had come out of hospital that day, so I wasn’t going to be in the restaurant late, but felt I owed it to our guests in the hotel and diners in the restaurant to be there. A booked group of four arrived late and insisted on having coats hung on their chairs, not putting them in the cloak cupboard. I’ve been around a long time and my antennae twitched. I said to the restaurant manager, ‘keep an eye on them, they will be trouble’. He thought I was being over the top.
 
Shortly into the starters one of the women called a waitress over and said she didn’t like her starter. The restaurant manager changed it free of charge despite her admitting there was nothing wrong with it, she just didn’t like it - the other lady was happy with the same starter.
 
When I went to the table, knowing what had happened, I asked if the replacement was OK, she said ‘yes’, but that she didn’t like the restaurant manager’s attitude. I apologised and said I’d talk to him and did, but only to repeat be careful.
 
When he next went to the table she said how pleased she was to see him again and that his boss needed to learn customer management! Not long after I was behind the bar when she came back from the loos. She stopped and started stroking my hand, which was resting on the bar, and told me how good my restaurant could be and that she understood catering and could help me! I wouldn’t have let her wash the dishes! If she had stroked my hand once more I’d have threatened to sue her for sexual harassment.
 
I said I wasn’t staying late and at about nine, I did a final round of the tables including speaking to folk I knew on the next table to the difficult table. They wished my wife well and I left.
 
Half an hour later they asked the restaurant manager if I was still there and when he said no, they said not to worry.
 
A few weeks later I ran into the people sat next to the difficult table in town, who told me that after I’d left one of the men on the other table said, ‘we’re not going to get away with it in here.’ My mind pictured the coats on their chairs, ready to don them, argue and run! But they had paid, albeit for 4 nor 5 starters!
 
And so, to the Hobgoblin in Bristol and the review by Chloe which was reported in the Morning Advertiser. My heart goes out to the staff and I take my hat off to the owner Jeff Ayliffe for his reply on TripAdvisor. I’ve experienced similar things, not in the hotel but in my pub, where we had a very strict no swearing policy. I once banned someone for telling a girl behind the bar that it was part of her job to be sworn at!
 
It is an offence to serve someone who is drunk and in refusing to serve Chloe, the staff were right. Her attempts at intimidating them are sadly not uncommon. But you can lose your licence by serving somebody who is obviously drunk. The problem is that if you do refuse, they can kick-off and it create an incident. Sometimes it can be better to serve them and say, ‘just the one’, and more often than not they know they are less than sober and move on.
 
We would call time at midnight on Friday and Saturday with no admission or readmission after 11, so the last hour had to be nicotine free! One night we had complaints from neighbours about the noise in the street, it was people banging on the door and shouting because we wouldn’t let them in. 
 
It is all part of the fun of being a landlord, but power to you James for both your stance and your review. You’ve obviously got some good staff. Keep it up and if I lived nearer I’d be in for a pint or two as a regular.

This Monday (February 4th) was National Sickie Day, and once again I was invited by an array of leading UK radio stations to discuss how employers can combat so many people pulling ‘sickies’.
 
There were an estimated 350,000 absences from work on the first Monday of February in the UK last year, so it is a serious issue…
 
Employees are less likely to come into work if they don’t enjoy the environment, but a healthy company culture where everyone is valued can significantly reduce sickies from occurring.
 
Below, you can listen to some of my interviews on the topic and find out how we can abolish the sickie once and for all!
 
BBC Radio Humberside