Marble Arch - hold on tight.

I'm no longer sure if I would find my way around some of my old 1970/80s haunts in London if I was to base it on the names of the hotels I worked in back then.

I started working in London in 1974 at the St George's Hotel right next door to the BBC HQ at the top of Regent Street (Langham Place)  and then in January 1976, working for Grand Metropolitan Hotels in a central HQ administration/accountancy role that took me to a different hotel somewhere in the UK every week. My office was just off Oxford Street near Bond Street tube station.

I suspect we had about 30 hotels in London alone including some swish names - The Mayfair, St Ermins, Britannia, Europa, Piccadilly and another 30 outside London from Exeter to Edinburgh.

One of the hotels was the Mount Royal Hotel at Marble Arch. It has a different name nowas do almost all the hotels. A massive tourist hotel that always seemed to be full of Spanish and Greek speakers. It was the first hotel we had that was equipped with a computer reservations and billing system. I remember the massive building works that had to be done to make a special room with air conditioning to accommodate the banks of massive machines. I suspect nowadays the same computing power would fit in a mobile phone.

So Marble Arch was one of the places I frequently visited. In the five or so years doing the job, one hotel I never got to visit was the Europa Hotel in Belfast which back then was the most frequently bombed building in Northern Ireland. No idea how I managed to avoid the assignment - we were a team of six and generally visited a site twice a year and there were at least two if not three of us.

So Northern Ireland is a place I have never been. My daughter has been living for the last 13 odd years in the Irish Republic, just some 30km from the Northern Ireland border and often "crosses" the border to go shopping. Or as today, to simply enjoy a day out. Together with family and brother J, they took off for the caves at Marble Arch Global Geopark, a lovely looking rural area.

I haven't had a full report from the grandchildren on what happened but got a few photos sent to me in the course of the day. When granddaughter Charlotte told me they were going there when we talked on her birthday last Friday, I gave her a few hints on stalactites and stalagmites. I think she thought her grandpa was totally bonkers!

I don't think I need to go into any detail as to why Brexit is more than totally bonkers and alone from the issue of peace in Ireland, is madness. Any return to the 1970/80s troubles will cost the UK far more than any reputed savings they are making from exiting the EU.