Welcome
to the
June 2017
Winter Rissington Rag
Special Snowflake Edition
Off-Beat News and Views
Rissington Inn, Hazyview, South Africa

A Day in the Life of an Hotelier


Believe it or not, The Rissington Rag is 10 years old, which means that I have sent out about 40 of these rants and still people are reading them. Extraordinary. A friend told me the other day that the Rag says more about me than I realise. I hope that is a good thing, but of course it is not about me at all. It is about a hotel, a magnificent team of staff, a complicated industry and a fabulous country.
The joy of putting together the Rag is that it gives us all a chance to look back over a 3-month period and assess what has happened to Rissington (and to the country and to the world as they affect Rissington) in that period, and to reminisce about some of the quirkier moments we have enjoyed.


The Lunatics Have Taken over the Asylum

Rissington is still holding its own there. Number One in Hazyview at the time of writing. Here is a chart to show the breakdown of positive views of Rissington, kindly provided by guest and professional statistician Scott Franklin from Queensland, Australia, who not only came up with the proud-making statistic that only 1 in 100 reviewers of Rissington finds it to be below average but also compared our ratings with those of a number of hotels and resorts in which he and his wife Margaret have stayed over the past couple of years.



Anyway, because of these idiots, it seems that many of the sane people have realised that it is not quite as much fun as they thought it was, thus leaving it to the lunatics and the complainers. Of course, there are many exceptions, among them numerous avid readers of the Rag. We love the positive reviews we receive, though, so please - you sane people - keep them coming. It is now even more important than ever to keep a sense of balance in the face of the occasional nutcase-onslaughts.
South African Inventions

No-one can beat the ingenuity of the average South African when it comes to minimising effort, whilst still achieving a satisfactory result.
Send in any good South African ideas or inventions you come across and, if we feature them, we will give you a free dinner.
Rissington and Rhino Poaching

Finally, stripping the vehicle for the last time as they left the park, the security guard unearthed Former-Gapper Jonny's British passport, which he had unwittingly left under the seat, and decided that Sydney and Wise must have murdered Jonny and stolen the vehicle to carry out their heinous poaching spree.
The poor two guys were mortified. A more decent pair you could not wish to meet. Thank goodness not every tourist to the Kruger is put through what they experienced.
Finally - another thought for the Brits, especially after their recent traumatic election. Some Brexit advice photographed on the Sabi River in Skukuza:

Anthropomorphism
Still on the subject of the Kruger National Park, regular Ragsters might remember that one of my pet hates is people who talk to animals as if they were people, with the exception of the Rissington dogs, who are, of course, people. Although Bull, being deaf, should obviously not be expected to respond.Anyway, this one amused me:

'It's come to my attention that you've been using your work computer to download violent images of zebra being slaughtered.'
It's Snowflake Time
"Will your children be adversely affected by the clocks going forward?" This is a genuine Sky News headline, presumably initiated by the unspeakable Kay Burley. What? Will they be affected by a one-hour time-change? Shame. Little treasures. So delicate.
We Baby Boomers are the generation that gave you the Beatles, Genesis and Punk Rock. We are a dynamic bunch of go-getters driven by ambition. The Snowflakes, on the other hand, come from an era that has contributed George Ezra and Miley Cyrus and they cannot be trained, because they do not like being told what to do. It upsets them. They have an absurdly inflated sense of their own uniqueness and believe that we must fit in around them, pat them on the backs, tell them they are wonderful, nurture their little water bottles that they carry around with them so that they don't dehydrate - and we must always agree with their politically correct platitudes and remember that hey take offence easily, even going so far, at universities, as to ban speeches by speakers likely to offend their delicate sensitivities.
NO!!

There. You see. I am right.
Further to that, many Snowflakes suffer a particular level of vanity which leads them to work out all the time as they are so concerned about their appearances being inadequate. There is even a word for the condition:
Muscle dysmorphia : According the god of Wikipedia ... Muscle dysmorphia is the obsessive preoccupation with a delusional or exaggerated belief that one's own body is too small, too skinny, insufficiently muscular, or insufficiently lean, although in most cases, the individual's build is normal or even exceptionally large and muscular already. Sometimes called "bigorexia", "megarexia", or "reverse anorexia", it is a subtype of body dysmorphic disorder, but is often also grouped with eating disorders. Muscle dysmorphia mostly affects males.
Even in some of our competent gappers - the ones that do get up in the morning - it seems to manifest itself in excessive gym-usage, the ingestion of powders full of steroids and the devouring of absurd numbers of eggs and tins of tuna. (The lazy ones appear to be unaffected by this condition, preferring to get up at lunchtime instead of exercising).

'From now on you must issue a trigger warning before you can call anyone a snowflake.'
And it is not just me. I urge you to watch this video so that you know what you are up against: HERE

In the interests of balance - and so as not to upset the Snowflake readers - HERE is the other side of the story.
And - in more positive news - there is, it seems, one innovation for which we should apparently grateful to the Snowflakes. Because they don't like noise to intrude on their delicate little device-driven finger-clicking worlds, apparently our cars and fridges are going to stop beeping at us. If only they can stop railway carriages talking to us, we shall really have made it!
And while the Snowflakes remain umbilically hitched to their phones and their 'I am special and the world will not cope without me for 12 hours until I am back at this desk' Out of Office Replies, the rest of us can carry on with our lives and simply put up a sign that says 'I am out of here - leave me alone!'
The "Where in the World" Competition

For this month's competition again, detail is everything. Where was this photograph taken?

Keeping up with Demand
It has been our policy, for a while now, to change and/or improve any aspect of Rissington that any sane person professes not to like although of course we receive very little in the way of negative comment, with Change Nothing and Never Change a Winning Team being the two most common threads in our guest feedback (that which is received from guests on departure, not the comments posted online by demented trolls). I particularly liked the feedback from 'Dan' last week, who wrote : "Probably the best accommodation I have ever had (aged 70)."
General maintenance is, naturally, the biggest ongoing issue we face, with people somehow unwittingly giving hotel rooms so much more of a pounding than they do their bedrooms and bathrooms at home. To this end, therefore, we closed for a week in June in order to carry out a full and comprehensive fix-up of every piece of equipment, every cable, every basin plug.

And while all of this was going on, we fixed up all the thatched roofs on the main house and the four newest garden suites and fitted new lights to many of the rooms in order to improve the ambient lighting.
On Yer Bike : Our Travels


Perhaps I am too much of a control-freak to be contained at someone else's whim on a boat for ten days. Perhaps the endless security became wearing. Perhaps it was the filthy rubbish in the Nile and its towns. Perhaps I am just a bit of a Philistine. I just didn't really get Egypt.

I spent much of my time birding from the deck with some really great fellow-passengers - thank you Peter and Sue - where I saw my first Purple Gallinule, several Smyrna Kingfishers and Palm Doves abundant, but with about 200 hundred species of bird at Rissington on a good day, even that was not enough. The upside is that Peter and Sue are coming here for their next holiday, so that we can show them some of Kruger's 529 species.
Anti-Social Media and a New Rissington Gallery
As a linguist, I found the hieroglyphs (along with the delicious vegetarian food) to be one of the more interesting aspects of the Egypt visit, with each Pharaoh having his own cartouche (or logo) showing a literal transliteration of his name. And then I was sent this chart which shows that are are still using them:
Proof that maybe we haven't really advanced at all!

When you next dig out your tablet, I would urge you to join the Inn crowd and follow us on Facebook and/or Twitter ...
We are also continuing to revamp the Rissington website : www.rissington.co.za. It will have a completely new look by the time the next Rag comes out. Tour operators and website operators please note: you can update your photos any time from a new OneDrive Gallery HERE. We urge you to do that. There is nothing worse than having stale and out-of-date images lurking on the Internet.
Non-Snowflake Gap Year Students

Guest Quote of the Month
Before I take you to the Quote, here is my fascinating fact of the month : A fake airport (one that didn't even exist) was sold by Nigerian scammers to an unwitting victim for 242 million dollars. You have been warned. They are still out there!And for the Quote of the Month - a phone call. About 8pm. Italians:
"Hello, we are lost. We are trying to get to your hotel."
"Where are you? What was the last town you went through?"
"We don't know."
"Do you have a GPS?"
"Yes, but we don't know how it works."
"Do you know what road you are on?"
"The R something. We went through Nelspruit about three hours ago."
"Three hours ago? Nelspruit is only 40 minutes from here!"

The next day, we had a call from arriving guests who were stuck outside Graskop with a puncture, who couldn't change the tyre. We put it down to incompetence until they explained that they had been charged by a rhino in Kruger the day before and were to terrified to get out of the car. How were they to know that there were no rhinos in Graskop?

Now, everyone else, please identify your favourite time to be at Rissington and BOOK NOW! Drop us an email to info@rissington.co.za. (If on the other hand, you are looking for a 6-bed self-catering unit in the area, in 14 out 21 July, we know of one available at Sanbonani, Hazyview, for a very good price. Email us if you are interested).
Either way, we very much hope to see you.
Chris the Snowflake-melter, GM Hlengiwe (and yes, in case you missed it last time, she has passed her driver's licence), Ever-cheerful Shirley (now Assistant Manager), Nonhlanhla (FOH Manager - currently away on a breeding programme), Genius Euginia, Sydney Australia, Wise #BeWise Shabangu, Godson-Gapper Will, Gapper Alex, Danisile, Sipho the Driver, Head Chef Thandi, Cindy, The Great Gertie, Emelda, Zenzile, Betty, 10-Ton Thuli, Lily, Sanny, Sisters Ntombifuthi (Foots) and Nokuthula (Noggs), Patience, Yvonne, Able Aubrey, Sbusiso the Womaniser, Guy The Guy and Ezekiel the Weekend Man (and, in his spare time, JJ's cousin). And of course JJ, who has just sat his senior school entrance exams, and his new Zimbo side-kick Tanatswa, who is also staying with us. Plus German(ish) Shepherd Bull, who is so deaf now that he barks at himself when he hears himself barking in the distance and Rusty the Mongoose Chaser.