Simon Jenkins ought to bob down to Heathrow Terminal 5 where, despite one of the largest and calmest terminal buildings in the world, the bar is still chaos (and is under a low ceiling with a walkway right through the middle with no windows to the outside world). He also might think about going to Manchester Airport Terminal 3 where the bar is the focal point of the entire terminal, is where everybody congregates and, again, is total chaos (and is currently partially a building site with no windows to the outside world).
However.
We are not comparing airports or bars and, as a review goes, the man with a thousand clichés has summed it up reasonably well. It is too noisy, it is too busy, the service is lousy, it is a bit scruffy and it is definitely overpriced. I applaud his solid grasp of the English language and his skill in using it to paint an abstract picture of the story he is telling.
I feel that it should also be pointed out that the review ends on a reasonably positive note, with a fair and capable description of the goods on offer in an apparent attempt to add some much needed balance to the piece, giving the bar a little credit for the things that are done well. Despite this, the aforementioned Mr Jenkins has not escaped my derision....
As lbaspotter rightly points out, it is a bar in a airport - a busy, frantic, chaotic environment. He writes the review as though it is to be lambasted for not having regular punters; as though the function of it is for customers to turn up on a Sunday evening and have a quiet pint whilst reading the paper. One of the vagaries of an airport bar is that there is no predictable pattern of custom. It does not attract a certain type of visitor (despite the petty assertion that Tomato Ketchup suggests a low class clientele) and it does not have traditional busy sessions. One could walk in on Thursday morning at 6am and find a raucous, drunken atmosphere with little room for manoeuvre or arrive on a Saturday evening and find it less energetic than the Duracell bunny.
What I imagine has happened here is that Mr Jenkins has been on his well earned holiday, found the pub was not to his liking, wrote a very subjective review in the time that he had to wait for his flight and submitted it to his superiors in lieu of visiting another pub. I think the YEP then published such a poorly manufactured article happy in the knowledge that, regardless of what they print on the matter, they won't substantially alter the fortunes of one retail unit with a captive audience of three and a half million people a year. Had the review been about a start up ale house with a few loyal customers where a poor review could be the difference between success and failure, I suspect more care would have been taken.
Whatever the case may be, Mr Jenkins has seen an opportunity to make a name for himself and, to a certain extent, he has succeeded as we are discussing his article here in the Forums4Airports book club. But he may look back upon this piece of work in the future as one of the reasons he didn't quite make it out of the low rent regional paper serving the very people he tries to abuse - the low rent regional paper that is lucky to have him - to the big leagues of the national tabloid, or even broadsheet press. After all, if he wants to write good reviews he needs to know his stuff and remain objective, even if he wishes to display his linguistic ability ad arbitrium.
His piece suggests neither skill is attributable to him and, though The Saltaire Bar takes twelve rounds of pounding, it is he that is left flat out on the canvas.
