It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
2009 delivered a distinctly mixed bag of fortune for this family.
In February, after a very long and painful illness, my mum died. She was only seventy and had just recently moved back from Somerset to be nearer her grandchildren. It was a bittersweet ending. That she had been so ill and in so much pain for so long was a release. That she was our only remaining parent and grandparent has left a big hole in all our lives.
Between her death and funeral Oliver sat his entrance exam to move up from his Prep School to Senior School. Unfortunately, his unhappy personal circumstances, the fact that he is dyslexic and that he had been having extra support from the school did not stand him in good enough stead to secure a place, despite having been assured year after year that he had as good a chance as anyone, and he was told he could only go to the senior school if his parents were prepared to pay double for a boarding place. Needless to say his parents weren’t and Oliver, given what had just happened, didn’t relish the enforced separation from his remaining family either.
Imagine trying to tell a ten year old boy as gently as possible that the school he had loved and was so proud to be a part of didn’t think he was good enough for them anymore. Luckily he's made of stern stuff and by the end of the year he would be telling anyone that the school wasn't good enough for him.
Two weeks after all of this I was hit by another car while turning to park alongside the school bus. The impact was big enough to leave me incarcerated in airbags and the oncoming car half way down an embankment (make your own mind up from that as to whose fault it was).
Afterwards Oliver, who along with everyone else on the bus had seen the whole thing happen, just said ‘Daddy you took so long to get out of the car I thought you were dead. After everything that’s happened with school and Nanny, Daddy, I just wanted to be dead too.’
Although it all felt like a tragedy at the time, there was a silver lining. Oliver and Emily saw out the rest of the school year at prep school and moved to our local Church of England primary school in September. With appropriate support, Oliver gained eight months reading age in six weeks and is thriving. As for Emily, only seeing her now ('it's way better than Barney' is her new stock phrase) do we realise how unhappy she was before. Needless to say we are so proud of them both.
From such an inauspicious start the year was only going to get better. We were already riding on the high of having won tourism awards from both Cumbria and England’s North West and by April hopes were even higher that we may be able to take our success all the way to the top and win EnjoyEngland’s national award for guest accommodation - in our case that's posh bed & breakfast, sumptuous dinners and fabulous weddings and house parties.
However, up against some very strong players, we were certainly not feeling complacent when we showed up at the National Railway Museum in York for the awards on St George’s Day, 23 April.
Well, we won and on 24 April bookings went crazy. We were totally unprepared for the effects and the rest of the spring and summer passed in a sort of haze. To celebrate we took all the staff racing at Ladies Day at Ripon Races in June and had a great summer garden party at the beginning of August when we were blessed with a perfect summer’s day, either side of which it tipped with rain. The parking could have been a problem but wasn’t in the en and the only person to get their car stuck in the field was the bank manager. When I offered to assist only once we had renegotiated our overdraft he failed to see the funny side of things but everyone else did.
By the end of August we were able to look back on occupancy during the three month high season of 93%.
My mum, of course, didn’t live to see us reach what could justifiably be termed the top of our game and that was all the sadder because without her financial and moral support at the very start our Augill adventure would never have been anything more than a dream. There had been little opportunity for emotion back in February when she died, but as we drank champagne on the evening of the award and danced away the night the tears came for her and our other parents and just for a moment we felt very alone; like, perhaps, the feeling of reaching the top of Everest and realising there's nobody else there to see you make it and knowing that the ones who saw you off from base camp have now gone and aren't coming back.
Half way through the summer we were nominated as Individual Boutique Hotel of the Year at the British Travel Awards alongside such luminaries of the hotel industry as The Dorchester, Babington House and Wooley Grange. The final outcome was to be decided by public votes and so we instigated a voting campaign. Press releases went out proclaiming the new story of David & Goliath. Clearly others did the same and in the end Goliath won the battle and The Dorchester took the gong but we ended up in the list of ten finalists.
Not bad going for an eleven bedroom bed & breakfast and indeed our growth has thrown up some pertinent points about whether we are still truly a B&B or whether we should be repositioning ourselves as a small hotel. We suspect that’s a debate that will run for some time yet.
But in the meantime, in the Autumn, a new debate started thanks to a Tripadvisor reviewer who felt compelled to warn others that we are misrepresenting ourselves as a castle when in fact we are ‘only a foley {sic} built to represent a castle’.
So we asked ourselves ‘what is the definition of a castle?‘ Tripadvisor wouldn’t let us ask the question online as it seems a two way dialogue is in contravention of its terms of use. But we’ve asked guests, we’ve asked fans on Facebook and we’ve asked for feedback on our website. It seems the definition of a castle is pretty wooly. As wooly, in fact as Hall, House, Towers or Palace. We considered suing the descendants of the man who built Augill for his egocentricity and lack of foresight in failing to predict the confusion his home naming would cause in centuries to come but eventually decided to stick with the castle moniker because the truth is, we have battlements, six turrets, one tower and a dozen or so arrow slits. We just prefer to welcome marauders in these days rather than pour burning tar on them.
But in the end some people will always be intent on attack and we must defend ourselves, not from our own fortifications but on the battlefield of the internet.
And the internet has played a big part in 2009. From pretty much a standing start I have redesigned our website, taken on the content management, learnt to tweet on Twitter, faced up to Facebook, grappled with the intricacies of email marketing and more than just dabbled in search engine optimisation. (For more, see January 2010's blog)
It’s been a steep learning curve but not as steep as the one we accompanied Wendy on in August. Having taken Oliver and his pals on a swinging-through-the-tress GoApe adventure last year for his birthday the pressure was on to do something bigger and better this year. So, I had the great idea of doing the Via Ferrata in the Lake District. A 1000 feet vertical ascent up the side of a mountain strapped to a steel safety line. That may sound OK until I tell you that Wendy came too.
And she once fainted from fear standing on a chair.
Wendy has since gone on to do her own GoApe challenge and her new found fearlessness will be put to good use getting rid of the vegetation growing out of the castle roof.
Wendy turned forty on September 1 and we gathered our closest friends on to a vintage double decker for another day out at the races. The sun shone and Wendy was lost for words. It was historic and probably unrepeatable. She also realised a long held dream to record her own CD which arrived just before Christmas. Too late to knock Susan Boyle off the top of the charts but the perfect solution to everyone’s Christmas present problems (although Emily and Oliver complained that ten copies each just to bulk out their stockings was a bit cheap!).
Notwithstanding all the ups and downs, the year is perhaps best summed up in the people we have met and those who have come back again. Whether it’s because we have won awards or because our marketing is effective in reaching the right sort of people, we have had more lovelier guests this year than ever before. There have, of course, been people who just didn’t ‘get it’, who thought that there was no effort required on their part to create a rapport or who thought that what we sell is just a bed for the night rather than a slice of an experience, but they were fewer this year than ever. It’s the wonderful families whose children have kept in touch with ours, Nancy who made herself so at home on all of our sofas in turn, Dana who shared with us her dilemma of whether to fly home to America on the private jet where she'd have to make her own sandwiches or first class where she wouldn't, the folk from Colorado who sent us simply the best almond toffee for Christmas, the guests who sent flowers and champagne when we won our awards and the guests who took the time to write when my mum died who have made, and will continue to make, it all worthwhile.
And lest we should ever forget, we remind ourselves of a good friend’s words. ‘Always look forward but also always remember where you have come from’. We have indeed come a very long way. But the only thing that hasn't changed is the most important thing of all - Augill is an intensely personal creation and that means warts and all! And a slice of that is what we sell.
