My 2018 year-end summary

As the year nears its end, it leaves me with many mixed feelings.  Everybody knows how unhappy I have been about this country’s suicidal plunge into its Brexit nightmare.  I am a European through and through, half my family being Austrian, and I love my multi-national heritage which led me into a delight for languages.  I will finish this blog with something on this topic, but I like to include some more heart-warming and life-enhancing moments which have occurred.  These are the times which convince me that there is indeed a pattern to my life into which all those things which I consider important insert themselves, as though into some pre-ordained shape.  There have been many such moments during the past year, and I list a few of those I consider the most significant.

I have just come across something in a book I happened to pick up from a shelf of unread books, one that I had bought many, many months ago and often put aside as being something I did not at the moment feel I wanted to read.  And yet today there it was, and I found myself taking it with me to my favourite breakfast cafe for my last end-of-year favourite breakfast (a single espresso and a croissant), only to find an illuminating passage which spoke to me.

"Just as when, as we read some books, an almost confusing feeling… can take hold of us, we hand ourselves over to the flow of the words, to their sound, and trust that the text will somehow help us, that it will do something to us, this is much like what happens when he (the main protagonist of this book) is writing.  Forgetting all his plans and ideas, most of his notes thrown away  -  and whilst he hands himself over to the rhythm and poetic logic of the sentences, the smell of his pencils, their quiet scratch on the paper, he fills page after page with a story of which he had not before thought of one word.” (Ralf Rothman: Fire doesn’t burn)"

This exactly reflects what I often feel when reading - that a writer’s words mean something to me , although I don’t know exactly what, as though they reveal a truth hidden behind the actual words.  Certainly this is often how I feel about that most elusive of all forms of writing, poetry.  This I realise, too, is how I view five element acupuncture.  I know that there is a truth hidden behind my practice which I have tried in my own way to put into words in my books, but behind the words I have found to describe what I do lies a profounder truth about human existence, and its glories and its tragedies, which is beyond words, or perhaps only accessible to the most gifted of writers.  I cannot prove that the elements create life in all its varied forms as I describe their actions, and yet I know, at a level beyond words, that they do.

A profound confirmation of this thought occurred during one of my visits to Beijing this year.  My time there happened to coincide with a seminar given by Peter Eckman.  Those who recognise his name will know that he has written the only book, In the Footsteps of the Yellow Emperor, which covers in detail the history of five element acupuncture’s journey to the West,.  Peter and I have known each other for many years, and I was delighted that it so happened  that Professor Liu Lihong, the host of all our many five element seminars, also happened to be in Beijing at the same time.  Peter, Professor Liu, Professor Hor Ting of Yunnan University and Guy and I, plus Lynn who does absolutely everything that needs doing to ensure our stay runs smoothly, therefore found ourselves one evening seated together round a table in a Beijing restaurant.

Peter, I think rather with tongue in cheek, and much to my surprise, since it contradicts what he says in his book, came out with the controversial statement that he didn’t think that JR Worsley had followed any particular acupuncture master in devising his approach to acupuncture.   Whereupon Professor Liu said firmly, “There are three routes of transmission for any discipline.  There is the direct transmission from master to pupil, the indirect transmission through texts, and then", he said, pointing above his head, "there is direct transmission from above."  And this is how he felt JR Worsley had come to his understanding of five element acupuncture.  I loved the fact that somehow something of the truth about human beings embedded in our knowledge of the elements was transmitted directly from above into JR’s heart, to be handed on, often in the same way, to others.

And something that has just happened rounds off my year with a smile, and makes this very sad year which seems to be heading inexorably towards the tragedy of Brexit end on a slightly happier note for me.

In September I wrote to JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame suggesting that it was time that an ardent anti-Brexiteer like her should stand up more and be counted to help fight the cause of us Remainers.  For those of you who didn’t know I had done this, here is my September email to her, via her Press Secretary (email drafted with help from a PR expert (Gill):

"Dear JK Rowling,
For years I have not only admired your literary genius but also your strong political voice on many of the big issues of our time. So I have an ask. The anti-Brexit campaign is well meaning but failing. I know you have already spoken out about the stupidity of this decision, but as we draw closer to this political madness becoming a reality, could you maybe go even further? I am no publicist but could we get Harry Potter yelling from the rooftops to protest? Or a series of powerful tweets from you to help galvanise the country to halt this impending gloom?

Yours, in hope,
Nora Franglen"

I heard nothing back, and assumed that my email never reached her ….. except that, a day ago in the Guardian, I read the following:

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Leader: Author Rowling mocks Corbyn on Twitter:  JK Rowling, a longtime critic of Jeremy Corbyn, has mocked the Labour leader’s position on Brexit in a series of 16 biblical-style tweets. Entitled “The Visitation of the Corbynites: A Festive Thread”, the Harry Potter author includes the claim that the possibility of “Saint Jeremy” bringing a “Jobs First Brexit” is “bollocks”. 

Do you think she did, after all, get my email, and heard my plea?  I’ll never know, but I like to think it may not just have been coincidence that she wrote this series of tweets.

I sent this email to many of my family and friends, finishing it with the words, with which I am rounding off my blogs for the year:

A Happy Christmas, and now a Happy New Year, to you all from a smiling Nora!  Let us hope the world becomes a happier place in 2019.

 

"Bug hotels"

Glimpsed for the first time on the pavement of the busy Euston Road in central London, a little notice saying “Bug Hotel”.  I was intrigued enough to stop and read.  It said that they (whoever “they” are) have allocated two small boxed-in garden areas along the road as spaces dedicated to helping small insects survive the stresses of town life. They have filled various little containers with different types of twigs and seeds as food offerings to any little creatures, to help them fight the odds against them in such a heavily polluted area of London  This is a lovely antidote for me to all the wallowing in the misery of the world which often constitutes my daily reading of the newspapers.

Whoever had the idea to help little insects in this way should be applauded.  And I love the name “bug hotel”;  it makes me smile every time I think of it.

A little Pre-Christmas serendipity*

A few happy or odd things which I am drawing together into a pre-Christmas blog to cheer myself (and I hope others) up:

First:  An article in today’s Guardian newspaper with the heading:  “After this week, I no longer see Brexit as unstoppable”  (Hoorah, I said to myself)

Second: A lovely quotation about growing old by an American poet I have only just heard about, called Jorie Graham:

"You have to be ready for the late work.  Make sure you develop a toolkit that's wide enough for every middle stage and especially for the end...

I am living in the late season, but it has its songs, too”

 I like to think that I, too, am living in my late season, and I hope that my late season “has its songs, too”.

Third:  (and a most stupid, and therefore laughably funny advert, noticed on an estate agent’s window):  “Find your happy”, it said.

Who on earth came up with this ridiculous wording?  “Find your happy what?”  If it had said something like “Find your happy home”, that would have been a bit more understandable, although not very much so, but as it is, it has puzzled me every time I pass the estate agent on the bus, as I do nearly every day.  I wondered whether I should go in and ask them to explain what the advert means, but then decided there are more important things to do with my time.

 

*Dictionary definition:  The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.

Who says that coincidences don't happen?

I was given a lovely example of a strange and moving coincidence which took place, as many of my extraordinary life experiences seem to do, in a café, this time Paul’s in Marylebone High Street, to which I betake myself each morning to mull over my thoughts, with a croissant and small espresso in front of me.  I am often served by a young Italian waiter, Mattia, with whom I have struck up a warm friendship, as he, a great reader himself, is fascinated by how many books I read and by what I am writing.  Some months ago I gave him a detective story about Venice, since he was Italian and I thought it would help his command of English.   

I was immersed in my usual reading, when I noticed a woman of mature years with a face I seemed to recognize popping her head around the corner to stare quite searchingly at me, and then leaving the café.  The next minute Mattia plumps a book on the table in front of me and says, “You gave me a book about Venice some time ago, and this lady has just given me another book about Venice which she has written.”  The book was Donna Leon’s Earthly Powers.  Any detective story reader out there who doesn’t know who Donna Leon is should now go straight out and buy one of her books.  They are beautifully written accounts of life in Venice, a part of the world I know well from the many family holidays we spent on the Venice Lido.

As soon as I saw the book, I realised why the person who had looked at me had seemed so familiar to me.  Of course, she was Donna Leon herself, and I had been to a book launch she had given up the road at my local Daunt’s bookshop some months ago.  And the book I had given him was another of her books, as he showed me by placing the two books side by side, one signed by the author herself, the other signed by me encouraging him in his English studies.  I asked him why she had looked so directly at me, and he said he had told her that I was a lady who read many, many books and did my writing in the café.

Donna Leon lives in Venice and only visits London briefly.  What then are the chances of Mattia receiving two books by the same author in the same café, one given by the author herself and the other by me, both of us being together in the same place for just a few minutes?  I find it truly amazing how often such apparently coincidental happenings occur as though they are meant to be. It reinforces the, to me, comforting belief that that there is indeed a pattern to life, and whilst often this pattern remains unclear, occasionally, as today, it stands out in stark contrast to the shapelessness and random nature of much that happens around us.

Somewhat belated acknowledgement of the duality of mind and body

Recently the media have been paying a lot of attention to mental health and its problems.  It is as though people are only just now waking up to the fact that Western medicine concentrates upon the need to treat physical symptoms, whilst ignoring the fact that the solution to ill-health may well lie elsewhere.  It was therefore heartening to read the following in an article  in the Guardian entitled “Mental health?  It’s in the mind and the body, too”:

“Once we accept the union of mental and physical health, a few things become clear.  First, we should ditch the term “mental health”.  From now on, we should talk about someone’s health – all in. We should lose much of the stigma that still surrounds saying we are “mentally” unwell.  We’re not.  We’re just unwell. 

Second, treatment. What promotes good cardiovascular, endocrine and musculoskeletal health also promotes good mental health and vice versa.”

All this may seem so obvious to practitioners of a holistic form of medicine such as acupuncture that it hardly needs stating, but is clearly so far from obvious to the journalist writing this article that she shows her surprise at coming to the conclusions she does.  However odd we may find her surprise, it is nonetheless good that the holistic nature of healing is being recognized (at last, we might add) in this way.

Why are actresses called actors now? (Blog 2)

In a blog on 5 July 2011, I wrote about my puzzlement as to why the media now called all those who acted by the name of actors, irrespective of whether they were women or men.  Recently, with delight, I came across the following comment by somebody called Denise Gough.  Asked why she preferred to be called an actress rather than an actor, she said, “We fought to be on the stage.  We should reclaim that word.  I don’t know where it came from, this fucking notion that putting “ess” on the end makes us weak.  I would be no less afraid of a lioness than a lion.”

Hoorah for somebody who agrees with me that removing the perfectly appropriate word “actress” seems to me incomprehensible.  We don’t mind calling a daughter a daughter or a son a son, why then have we become so squeamish about the sex of those in the acting profession?  Has the world gone a little overboard in its attempts to be gender-neutral, to the detriment of common-sense?

Horary treatments

Many things have happened during my years of practice which still make me laugh at myself, none more so than my attempts to give my patients what we call horary treatments at the right hour of the day (or night).  The word horary, used as far as I know only in the context of acupuncture now, comes from the Latin word meaning “hour”.  Horary treatments are treatments given at specific times of the day which are seen as having a particular relationship to different elements.  The 24-hour day is divided into six four-hour periods, one specific to each of the elements (two for Fire), and, within these four-hour periods two two-hour periods relating to that element’s yin and yang officials.  Thus the hours from 3 – 7am relate to the Metal element, with 3 – 5am that of the Lung, (often the time of day when people take their last breath), and 5 – 7am that of the Colon (which is why this is an excellent time to empty the bowels ready to take on food between 7 - 9am, which is the Stomach’s horary time).

Giving a patient a horary treatment, particularly in the season of that patient’s element (for example some time in the early morning between 3 – 7am in autumn for the Metal element) is considered to be the very best treatment of all.  Bearing this in mind and remembering JR Worsley’s exhortation to us not to forget horary treatments, even if they are at anti-social times, such as in the middle of the night, in the full flush of being a keen new practitioner eager to put everything that I learnt into practise, I gathered together two of my Wood patients for a horary treatment in the night, the best time being just before 1am still in the Liver’s horary time and just after 1 am just into the Gall Bladder’s horary time, carefully setting my alarm for 12.30am to be sure to wake up.  To my surprise both turned up on time, and I completed the treatment, congratulating myself on doing what a good practitioner should do, however tired I would feel the next day.

Imagine my horror then when a few months later I realised that with the greater experience I had gained since then I now recognized that neither patient was Wood.  Imagine also my confusion when another patient, who this time I was sure was Wood, and I had also scheduled to come during the night, overslept and never turned up.  Was I to phone her home, though I was reluctant to do so for fear of waking the whole household (this was the time before everybody had mobile phones by their beds), and how long should I stay up in case she arrived late?  Even when I felt I was treating the horary points at the right time during the night, did this justify the possible inconvenience which my previous sad experiences had shown me?  Finally, too, had horary treatments proved to be the uniquely excellent treatments that warranted all this trouble?

I cannot say that the results of giving horary treatments at more sociably acceptable times of the day have prompted me to consider that facing the possible hurdles of night-time treatments is worthwhile.  But I still like to remember with affection my novice practitioner’s enthusiasm.  Certainly my patients were terribly impressed that I was prepared to sacrifice a few hours’ sleep for them, which I am sure made our relationships all the closer, perhaps the best result of all.

I now think back rather sadly and with some nostalgia to a time when I so enthusiastically tried to put everything I had been taught into practice, and realise that I, older, much more hard-bitten and less idealistic, but perhaps not wiser, would be unlikely to do the same now.

Something frivolous for a change (or perhaps not so frivolous)

As light relief from the horrors of this utterly unnecessary election and Brexit, plus the disasters of Trump, I am allowing myself to laugh at myself in this brief blog.

I am of the generation brought up in the real austerity days after the 2^nd world war, when there was nothing available in the shops to buy, and in any case you viewed buying anything which was not absolutely essential as frivolous, and made sure that you saved everything you could.  “Waste not, want not” was the slogan then.  These words popped into my head this morning as I walked, carefully watching where I put my feet on the increasingly uneven pavement (is the local council cutting back on repairing the road as well as everything else?), when I noticed, as I often do, one of the rubber bands which postmen now throw away as they walk on their rounds.  These rubber bands used to be red, but have recently changed their colour to brown.

I am always tempted to pick one up when I see one, because I often need them for all kinds of things, such as packing books together to hand on to my friends, and I baulk at the thought of buying a packet when so many lie discarded at my feet wherever I walk.  And then I thought of how odd it would look to see me bending over from time to time to pick them up (and what if I toppled over again doing this, just as I fell a few weeks ago?).  And should I then wash them to remove the street dirt from them?

So with reluctance I leave them lying sadly abandoned there, although each time I see one a little pang passes through me at the sight of so much waste.

Oh dear! Oh dear! I find that I am addicted!

I am reading a fascinating book by Adam Alter:  Irresistible: Why we can’t stop checking, scrolling, clicking and watching, about our obsession with our smartphones, our emails, our endless Twitter twittering and our fascination with Youtube. 

It makes for a sobering read, none more so than when we are told that leaving a very young child unsupervised in front of those children’s gadgets which transfix a child’s eyes for hours, but deprive it all too quickly of the ability to look people in the eye, actually damages their little brains.  Even something so harmless as talking to a child on Skype reduces the importance of eye-to-eye contact because the child cannot apparently pitch its eyes at the right level on the screen to evoke the kind of immediate response it looks for in the presence of another person.

Not being a two-year old, why did I come to the depressing conclusion that I, too, was addicted, but what to?  Of course it is to my emails, the only bit of electronic equipment I use.  I have, reluctantly, accepted the need for a Facebook account to pass on my blogs to a wider audience;   I can go for days without looking at it.  But I am, I now realise, hooked on checking to see if any new emails have arrived, so worried I apparently am with the need to answer them immediately, as though not doing so is impolite.

From reading this book I gather that this is a definite sign of an addiction.  I don’t have a smartphone so I can only check up on my emails when I am physically sitting in front of my computer, ready to tap away on a large keyboard with an old-fashioned mouse to hand.  Having now counted up how often I find myself returning to the computer when I am at home, and realising that my first action on coming back home is always to hurry to turn it back on again, I acknowledge that I do have as much a problem as if I had immediately to grab a glass of wine if I was a heavy drinker.  It may not be as harmful to my health as drinking too much, but it is probably as harmful to my peace of mind in its own way, because each email demands something of me, and often these demands are worrying or disturbing.  I am as much in thrall to this wretchedly addictive piece of equipment as anyone hooked to chatting endlessly on Twitter.

Of course, it is not only me, but all those countless others I see in the street or in cafes, their fingers twitching away at their smart phones, their eyes unable to look away to see the world around them, so busy are they scrolling up and down looking for God knows what.

I know that those emailing me can wait a few more hours or even a few more days for an answer from me, so I am resolved to watch myself now and reduce those compulsive excursions of mine to sit in front of the computer.  Let’s see whether I can manage this!

The taking of "selfies"

The following is a quotation from a book I am reading at the moment.  It is a detective story, and its author has many interesting insights into life.  The book is called Death in the Tuscan Hills by Marco Vichi.  Here he is describing somebody who is leafing through a photo album.

 

He retired to the kitchen with a box of old family photos…..Photos were ruthless.  They showed moments lost for ever, people long since dead.  They were an attempt to cheat death, a painful illusion, and looking at them made one more aware than ever that time was a mystery.

 

After looking at them all one by one, he closed the box of memories with a sigh.”

 

Perhaps, indeed, people’s recent mania for the constant taking of photos, usually of themselves, rather than giving themselves time to observe life at first-hand through their own eyes, is part of an attempt to ”cheat death”, to re-assure ourselves that we are alive.  I observe with some incredulity and much sadness this endless taking of photos, the living of life at one remove which this represents.  So many pieces of electronic equipment, such as smart phones with their numerous gadgets, now put a barrier up between people and the world around them.  I wonder what effect this is having on our personal relationships.

 

I was also saddened recently to hear that, far from connecting people to one another, as Facebook is intended to do, it can have just the opposite effect, that of isolating people.  I have been told that young girls can now spend hours alone in their rooms taking photo upon photo of themselves until they are satisfied with the one they eventually feel is good enough to send out to the world as their image of themselves.  This is more a case of a disconnect from the world rather than a closer connection to it.

 

 

A hidden London garden

Some days the unexpected happens, which always delights me.  I had one of those days a little while ago.  A bus I was on stopped unexpectedly at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, so I had to continue on foot, taking a small side passage leading to the back of Shaftesbury Avenue.  As I turned the corner behind St Giles Church I found myself walking along the pavement by the side of a small garden, closely surrounded on all sides by buildings.  I had been there before, and remembered being so happy to see a community garden tucked away here, obviously well-cared for by those who used it.  It's called the Phoenix Garden, an appropriate name, for it seems to be rising continuously from the ashes as a living symbol of nature striving to exist amongst all the new anonymous high-rise office blocks surrounding it.

I always feared for this garden, as it seemed just the sort of place in Central London which would entice developers.  But to my delight, not only is the garden still there, but it is being renovated at this moment.  Looking at its website when I got back home  (www.phoenixgarden.org.uk ) I was happy to see that the building work going on at the moment inside it (ominously I first thought) is only to build something to replace an old shed.

But apart from relief that the garden was still there, I suddenly saw something new, for on its side wall, the wall abutting the church, there had now appeared a large wall painting by a street artist I have great admiration for, who calls himself Stik. (Look him up on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stik.) The photo above shows this particular graffiti embraced by the branches of the trees in the garden.   Stik paints these beautiful stick-like figures (hence his pseudonym, presumably) on walls in places which are under threat from developers, not only in this country but around the world.  You can't really call them graffiti, because they are much larger and more expressive than that, but that is what they really are. A patient of mine told me he had seen one of his large paintings on a wall facing his hotel room in the States.  If you want to see more of his work, look at his website www.stik.org which shows some beautiful photos of his work from many countries.  And Penguins have published a lovely book, too, just called Stik.

Seeing these little people there on the wall cheered me up enormously on a day when I felt burdened by the dreadful news pouring in from around the world.  How good it is to know that there are people like Stik around who use their art to fight injustice.

Changes that creep up on us

Sitting in the train yesterday I was brought up short by one of those endless announcements that now annoyingly punctuate every journey.  “Customers are advised….”  Each time I hear the word “customer”, it irritates me.  Since when have passengers transformed themselves into customers?

I think of customers as people who pay for some service, passengers as people who travel in some kind of vehicle.  Is this then another sign of today’s overwhelming interest in money above all?  And what was wrong with seeing me as a passenger, as all travellers in any vehicle have always been known as?  I somehow can’t see an 18^th century coach driver calling his passengers customers. What is the rationale behind this, I wonder, except perhaps to give some work to some office somewhere in British Rail charged with finding new ways of saying old things?

It intrigues me why a change such of this has been thought necessary.  And this has set me thinking about other new ways of saying old things which have puzzled me.  There is, for example, the recent replacement of the good old word “alias” by the clumsy abbreviation “aka” (“also known as”).  Again, what was wrong with “alias”?

And then, to add to the odd things I have noticed, comes the disappearance of the Request Stop for buses on London’s roads.  In the good old days there were two sorts of bus stops, the ones at which all buses stopped irrespective of whether anybody was waiting.  You simply got up from your seat in the bus and waited for the bus to stop without ringing the bell.  And if you were waiting at the bus stop you did not need to wave the bus down, but just waited for it to stop, as you knew it would.  Request Stop signs were red, unlike the main stops which were and still are white, and were the ones where you, as a passenger (not a customer!), would need to stop the bus by signalling to it.  If you were not paying much attention, and did not signal quickly enough, the bus simply sailed on by.

Then I started to notice that people were ringing the bell inside the bus at whatever stop we were coming to, Request Stop or not.  And buses no longer stopped at stops which were not Request Stops. When did they start doing this and why?  Now everybody rings the bell at every stop, and everybody puts out a hand to stop the bus they want at whatever stop.  I realise that I don’t know whether all the red Request Stop signs have been replaced, or are simply being ignored, so today I will be looking out of my bus window (my usual mode of transport wherever I go in London) to check this.

This is another sign of the fact that we are now constantly being asked to do more and more work ourselves.  Where before I could leave it to the bus driver simply to draw in at many of the stops, now I have to make sure that I take steps to stop him (or increasingly her).  And in a book I read recently, it was pointed out that the computerized world of ours, by giving us the tools to do things like booking our own travel or buying our own shopping in supermarkets, actually makes each of us individually work harder and harder doing things which in the past other people did for us, such as travel agents and shop assistants.  We simply used to ask a travel agent to book us on a flight on such and such a day for such and such a place, and then waited for the phone call telling us that they had made the booking, and the letter to arrive with the airline ticket.  Of course there weren’t all the cheap flights around, and this is what we may have to accept in return for cheaper flights.  Yet even expensive flights, like mine to China, now require that I do all the work on my computer, trying to fathom all the complex choices I am confronted with, just as it is now up to me to make sure that I stop any bus I want to get on to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beckham's beard

I find it fascinating to observe the influence certain famous people can have upon a whole generation.  This is so in the case of David Beckham and his beard.  I remember a time, now shrouded in the mists of quite a few years, when only a dedicated few wore beards, and certainly not footballers.  And then along comes David Beckham, a style icon if ever there was one, sporting one kind of beard after another, first just a discreet growth on the chin, followed by other kinds of adornments, and finally a thick bushy beard which certainly did him no favours.  This has now been trimmed back to the kind of beard everybody is now wearing, in mimicry of him.

Once Beckham was seen with a beard I noticed that they gradually started to sprout everywhere, until, now, particularly among footballers, it is almost odd to see a beardless face.  And not just in this country, but throughout the world.

I wonder how far each bearded person thinks his type of beard suits him.  To my eyes some definitely do whilst others definitely do not.  I think here of Gary Lineker on BBC TV, whose face appears to have shrunk behind his rather wispy beard, whilst others’ beards suit them better.

I wonder, too, how far the women in these bearded men’s lives like this new fashion.   I know of one young man whose relationship has foundered on his girlfriend’s insistence that he shave off his beard, and a wife who hated her husband’s.  They are, after all, really prickly!

And there is also the case of Beckham's tattoos, another fashion many footballers have followed!

I am now waiting for Beckham to shave off his beard to see whether the fashion will change again.  I think the tattoos are here to stay.

 

Seen today

I walked past the Radisson Hotel in central London today, and saw on the window of its restaurant the words “Scoff and Barter”.  I looked at the sign three times to make sure that I wasn’t misreading it.


For non-English speakers whose English may need a little bit of help to understand these two words, “to scoff” is to laugh at, and “to barter” is to bargain about the price of something to get it reduced.  Does the hotel really expect its guests to mock and to barter at the prices it charges them?


At least the sign caught my eye, so perhaps that, rather than its meaning, was the purpose.