The recent terrorist atrocities in Manchester and London have certainly put unwelcome pressure on those planning to attend live events.

Question is whether one fights terrorism by continuing to go and thus not letting the terrorists win, as thousands do. Or does one take the view that attendance at the event is supposed to be for enjoyment and that worrying about being shot, stabbed or blown up can only detract from that enjoyment to the extent that it is not worth going, which is what the terrorism is meant to achieve. Continue reading →

Planning permission is being sought for a luxury 102-bedroom hotel with conference facilities, named-chef restaurant, bar, a Wellness Spa and swimming pool, the In and Out, on London’s Piccadilly.

A group of developers led by Tower Properties Management plan their new hotel, along with four private residences on the site to comprise 90-95 Piccadilly, 42 Half Moon Street and 10-12 White Horse Street, all of which are currently in a dilapidated condition. Continue reading →

A five-star hotel in Crete is counter-claiming £170,000 from a couple who submitted a £10,000 claim for food poisoning, a claim the hotel says is false.

Mr and Mrs Bodarenko stayed at the Caldera Palace Hotel for a week in 2013 but did not make their claim until this year, one they are now trying to drop after the hotel management alleged they had Facebook posts proving that the couple had enjoyed their holiday and proof that they had consumed “large quantities of alcohol” when they were supposed to be ill. One Facebook post from Mrs Bondarenko described the hotel as “gorgeous” and that they had been there three times.

The hotel’s counterclaim is for damage to its reputation.

Legal action for damage to its reputation is being threatened by a Tunbridge Wells restaurant after a customer posted a negative review on Tripadvisor.

Part-time nurse Sarah Gardner claimed that staff were “rude” and that the food was “mediocre at best” at the High Rocks restaurant. The restaurant say that she put up three low reviews and then took them down because they were “false”, and accuse her of a “campaign of defamation” that had caused “financial harm worth tens of thousands of pounds”.

Olympia London has been sold for £296 million to institutional investors who plan to have hotel accommodation on site.

The 130 year old venue, which hosts 200 events a year across its seven spaces incorporates nearly four acres of freehold land.

Eurostar have announced that they will be running a direct service from London St Pancras to Amsterdam by the end of 2017, taking on the airlines for the lucrative Christmas period.

Current Eurostar route is via Brussels Midi and the journey takes 4 hours 40 minutes. The new service, initially two trains a day is expected to take just under 4 hours, and a new direct service to Rotterdam is expected to follow.

In 2013 Eurostar told the press that the direct Amsterdam service would be operational by 2016.

Those who enjoy the chic of boutique hotels might be interested in a recent rating of 50 of the best in Europe by the experts at the Daily Telegraph, particularly if they’d rather pay less than £200 a night than £600+, so this is for them.

The 50 “Best in Europe” are rated from 8 out of 10 to 10 out of 10, and it is just one hotel in France that is awarded the perfect score and that is the 40-room La Bastide de Gordes in Provence, described as upmarket and family-friendly and costing from £172 a night, a bargain for the quality given that the average price across all 50 hotels listed by the Telegraph is from £223. One other notable French possibility from a total selection of six is the 34-bed La Vieux Castillon in Lanquedoc-Roussillon (9/10 £105). Continue reading →

An exhibition featuring around 100 works, mostly woodblock prints, by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) has opened at the British Museum and runs till August 13 2017, entrance £12.

Hokusai believed that he produced his best work after he had turned 60 and Hokusai Beyond the Great Wave concentrates on the last 29 years of his life, starting with his best-known Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji series, a life-saving commission for him that included the iconic In The Hollow of a Wave Off The Coast of Kanagawa. This, when viewed the Oriental way from right to left put the viewer right under a huge towering blue wave topped with a crest of white foam “claws”, as an admiring Van Gogh described them, reaching out to tear at the boats caught in the wave’s trough below. As well as seascapes and Fuji, which had a religious significance for him, Hokusai also excelled in pictures of bridges, landscapes, waterfalls, fish, flowers and birds. Continue reading →

It’s been 30 years since the 1987 American thriller Fatal Attraction scared the hell out of philandering males everywhere with the morality tale of the weekend affair that lawyer Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) has with editor Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) and how it escalates into a full-blooded nightmare for him after he spurns her and she refuses to give him up, becoming his demented nemesis. “Hell hath no fury…” the saying goes and Alex proves how unpleasant the woman scorned can be when one of her party-pieces is to kill (hopefully) and put Dan’s daughter’s pet rabbit into a simmering pot on the stove at his house, the source of the popular expression “bunny-boiler”. Continue reading →