Novel

9th July 2025

The indestructable Godfather Seat

Today's Wordle word in Novel... what was going to be novel about today?

For a start, we came across the first ever piece of pub furniture that isn't made of plywood and can be demolished with a crow bar, hammer and a good shove in under 60 seconds

Affectionally nicknamed the "Godfather Seat" there is a large oval table surrounded by fixed seating which quite frankly looks like something out of the 70's and takes up a huge amount of floor space for very few seats... It has to go

Our works team consists of the brother in law (wayyyy less grumpy than the hubby); he's handy and strong and here to help. We also have Super Erwin who has worked for us for 20 years as cleaner, cook, DIY extraordinare. He's Bolivian and strong as a pit pony. Can pick up full beer barrels for fun! These two chaps literally spent ALL DAY hammering, drilling, pulling, stamping with all their might and could not pull apart the damn thing! It is clearly made to measure from the ground up, has 1,000 screws, is layer upon layer of wood, the table top is so heavy they actually couldn't lift is between them; it basically fell to the floor making a god awful noise. No idea how we're every going to get rid of it but that's for another day

At this point the Security in our buliding pops round and politely ask us to stop making so much noise. Whoops! We meet the Building Mnager and explain that really this shouldn't be long or noisy but we are dealing with the strongest piece of furniture in the history of pubs... we decide to stop work on it for today, not work on it on Thursday and attack it on Friday when not too many of our hopefully future customers are on Teams calls ...

Next on the Novelty list is electricity; should be simple but errr nope. For those who aren't aware when you're "out of contract" for electric (or gas) as a commercial operator you are paying circa 10 x the going rate per KWH which is already circa 5 x the domestic rate. Needs sorting like now. No-one knows who the supplier was. How is this possible? Our meter isn't even in our building. Of course it's not! No supplier will provide us with a quote without knowing our KVA... We have no idea what a KVA is?! The newly acquainted Building Manger is again being helpful and will make enquiries... in the meantime we're contacting the previous tenant to more radio silence so far... and paying a living fortune for leccy!

Our final Novel entry for the day is internet; apparently OpenReach put a fibre line in but it's still under contract to previous tenant. No mention of this in our lease. Again, radio silence all round and no means of making a phone call in the building as it's a total dead zone for comms. A situation which clearly needs remedying PDQ to be operational. We know fibre can be tricky in the City but seriously...

We felt that was enough novelty for one day and went home for a well deserved beer (yes, that might be a recurring theme to our day)