Ambrosia

Posting this in January 2021
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My last day at work at the St George's Hotel at the top of Regent Street in London & right next door to the BBC HQ. I had been promised a  career move by the Personnel Manager who was 'relocated' overnight and nobody else in the huge Trust House Forte Hotel chain could find any official record of the promise.

Looking back  as I post this several decades later, I can't really believe I had the courage to simply pull up stumps, resign and decide to return home to Norfolk to consider my future. It meant leaving being close to my girlfriend Annie who was a (the) very important part of my life.

Seemingly I still had one day's holiday left for the year and finished on a Thursday. I took Annie out to the theatre to see Billy (Liar) which had started in London on 1st May 1974 and played 904 performances, mostly with Michael Crawford but towards the end Roy Castle, (with whom I was to spend an enjoyable, naturally joke-filled, evening in a hotel bar in York sometime in 1976/7).

As a final 'treat', I had booked a room at the historic Ivanhoe Hotel in Bloomsbury. I didn't have that much money, and it was close to the hospital and Annie's nurses home - she probably had an early shift the next morning.

So for me the end of my time in the mystical bright lights dreamland of Ambrosia and back to middle-class, rural Norfolk.