Forgotten Objects
In what Bristol hotel can you abandon your extraneous relatives?
What is the largest object consigned to oblivion at an English hotel?
Where in Somerset did a man prefer to be ‘off his head’?
Many of us have felt the urge to up sticks and flee from our relatives, but at the Travelodge in Bristol somebody gave a demonstration. After a family celebration, a great aunt was found drinking coffee on her lonesome after her great nephew drove off without her. A set of keys for a Bentley was also abandoned at another branch of the same hotel; may we suggest that these keys should have been handed to the ancient relative and she could have driven herself home?
Meanwhile, in the Weston-super-Mare branch, a cat named Baskin and a Yorkshire terrier named Robbins were left stranded. They seem to have been named after an American ice cream chain, based in Canton, Massachussets. The poor dears probably got the wind up, thinking they had been dumped in Canton, China, and were next for the pot.
Elsewhere,(and it’s the same hotel chain from now on, so I hope they’ll plug our wonderful Traditional Range Handmade Luxury Booties so that their customers can belt along their corridors in comfort and silence), a somewhat precipitate customer shot off without his 27’ Starchaser space rocket. Never mind, it was doubtless put to good use by the new mother-in-law of a forgetful bride, who had cast off her new BFF in the lobby only hours after tying the knot (oh, dear).
Other forsaken objets include an urn containing the ashes of a beloved husband and a bath full of Jersey potatoes (obviously intended for an out-of-hours fry-up on the grand scale). A winning Euromillions ticket and £500,000 worth of share certificates were also left languishing in the owners’ haste to hit the road.
Hotels, however, are not the only buildings where forsaken oddities have been found. A family moved into their new home to find the previous owners had left a pony behind. When confronted by their absent-mindedness, the vendors denied all knowledge of the poor animal. The pony, we are happy to announce, was subsequently adopted by the purchasers and lives happily with their horses.
Another woman moved into her new home, expecting champagne from the estate agent. Instead, she found a goodly collection of adult magazines, accompanied by beautifully, clear photos of the previous occupants re-enacting the poses therein. The pity of it all is that the former owners only moved next door; what effrontery.
A more unnerving sitting tenant can be found at Higher Chilton Farm, Chilton Cantelo, Somerset. It is the skull of Theophilus Brome, once a devout Royalist during the Civil War. After witnessing the inhumane treatment of the Parliamentarian prisoners, Brome joined the Roundheads. On the restoration of the monarchy, he lived quietly at the farm with his sister, whom he begged to preserve his skull in the house in perpetuity.
He made this request as he feared that, once dead, his corpse would be decapitated and his head displayed in public as a traitor to the King. The sister obeyed his request but subsequent farm tenants attempted to remove the skull to the churchyard. On every occasion that the skull left the house there was terrible screaming and poltergeist activity. The skull now rests in peace back in the house in a purpose- built cabinet over a door in the hall
Released On 24th Oct 2018
