Guest User
February 21, 2024
I’ll start by saying that this wasn’t the worst place I’d ever stayed. Mind you, I used to be a commercial traveller, I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels, some of which would make Basil Fawlty blush. I’d also like to point out right from the outset that the staff at the Tankerville were (mostly) absolutely lovely. Apart from one lady trying to drive us out of the bar at 9:30pm with Paddington hard stares. So what was good? Well, the staff were polite, friendly and helpful. Not always on top of things, it has to be said, but thoroughly welcoming and, at times, apologetic. What about the bad? Buckle in, this could take a while. When we arrived we were firmly asked to pay up front. This should have been an alarm bell if I’m honest. We asked to confirm that we had a table booked for New Year’s Eve. Yes, that’s right, 8:15pm. No, not tomorrow, New Year’s Eve. No, tomorrow is not New Year’s Eve, that’s the day after. Good, right, glad we got that sorted out. We got our key and went to our room which was very spacious. The decor (which has been criticised as ‘faded’) is old fashioned, but I rather like that. It was (mostly) very clean. It was also absolutely baltic. Now, I’m a bit of a spartan when it comes to living temperatures. I keep my house several degrees below what’s fashionable, and only put my heating on a couple of hours a day at most. Even I found this uncomfortably cold. At one point I charged up my sports watch, and while it was off my wrist it recorded the temperature as 14 degrees. That’s a water sensor inside the watch so I think that’s a bit higher than it actually was. We dumped our gear and made a cup of tea. There were two mismatched cups: a small (250ml) mug, and a teacup that was maybe 100ml. Less than a mouthful for an adult human. We usually use pint mugs, so this was a bit of a problem. I used my thermos mug instead. We went out for a walk around Wooler, and when we got back we were about ready to shower before dinner. The shower. Oh, the shower. Not that the water was cold. Not a bit of it, it was comfortably hot on full temperature. There just wasn’t very much of it. It trickled out of the shower head and fell straight down rather than arcing outwards as one would expect. I flipped the shower head upside down to see how much pressure there was and, where my bog standard electric shower at home manages to spray straight up to about 30cm, this managed perhaps 3. So that was quite disappointing. In the middle of winter. When snow was forecast. We went down to dinner and ordered 2 pints, one each of the two draught beers. The third pump didn’t have anything on it. Dinner came from a fairly short list of options. I had a vegan burger, which was fine although the bun was toasted just-to-the-point-of-burning. My partner had a pie. Well, that’s what the menu said. This alleged pie was… bizarre. Obviously the “casserole with a pastry top” pie controversy is long-standing, and I fall very much in the camp that a pie requires pastry