For most people, Saturday morning is a small weekly luxury — a gentle pause, a chance to catch up with life beyond work. For us, owning and running a small Highland hotel, Saturday mornings simply don’t exist. For thirty weeks of the year, from early April to the end of October, weekends are working days: breakfasts, turnarounds, arrivals, departures, late check-ins, early departures, laundry rhythms, team briefings, bar stock, reservations, repairs, and the ever-present “just one more” guest request. We don’t resent it — it’s the life we chose — but it means the usual punctuation marks of the week vanish. No leisurely brunches. No appointments. No gym workouts. No cheering on a team (or offspring) on the sports field. No personal admin. No gentle DIY in the home. And certainly no catching up with friends.
So when November arrives, it feels like a glorious, extended Saturday morning — a month-long exhale after thirty weeks of holding everything together. Hotel business still continues but our main focus is more domestic.
It doesn’t begin the moment the last guest leaves, but only after the closedown rituals are complete: the final deep clean, the ovens scrubbed back to silver and pans poached, the windows gleaming again, and the last of our seasonal team heading home. And then — suddenly — the hotel falls quiet. Corridors that only days earlier echoed with footsteps and conversation now hold a gentle hush. The kitchen, once full of bustle, clatter, loud music and the occasional football commentary (apparently vital to prevent custard from splitting), settles into a peaceful stillness. After months of rhythm and noise, the silence is startling.
The first morning we wake without an alarm, and without a breakfast service to prepare, has the odd feeling of a bank holiday that comes as a surprise. What do normal people do on a Saturday morning? It seems we take a whole month to find out.
The first wave of November is always friendship. All those postponed dinners and missed celebrations are squeezed joyfully into the diary. Visitors appear — long-overdue, warmly welcomed. Raclette machines are plugged in; wine is opened; the conversations stretch late into the night. There is news to exchange from the past half-year (or more), and laughter that grows louder as the room warms and the cheese melts. Plans for the coming year arise in that familiar, hopeful way — hill walks, voyages in the Tricia Mairi, small adventures, all promised with great enthusiasm and, depending on the level of merriment, varying degrees of realism. Sixtieth birthdays are already fading memories for us both.
Then comes the domestic archaeological dig. Every November, we rediscover the objects that were removed from the hotel in haste back in April or stored in a corner of our home with the despair of “things we failed to do this winter” — the shoes we meant to mend, the dry cleaning, the boxes of items destined for the loft, including Xmas decorations used last year (why bother putting now!), the spare couple of restaurant chairs that were stored annoyingly in the hallway for seven months. Contents of wardrobes are sifted through, and we’re oddly grateful to recall which jumpers we actually like and which ones we had quite forgotten existed.
And there is always the annual pilgrimage: dogs and cats bundled into the car for grooming appointments and routine vet checks - local means travelling right across the UK mainland to the east coast of Sutherland as life dictates here. Garden equipment makes its way to the workshops near Inverness for servicing, the lawnmower given its winter blessing, the strimmer coaxed back into life.
The Polycrub and workshop are cleared and reorganised in a satisfying rush of productivity that is entirely impossible during the season. Tools are cleaned, the mysterious missing screwdrivers reappear, and Richard’s workshop slowly evolves from “active construction site” to “place where things belong.”
Then there is the paperwork. Personal admin piles that have quietly accumulated — letters, reminders, forms, things requiring signatures, things requiring patience. Bureaucrats, in our experience, have never run a seasonal business: their reminders arrive faithfully, regardless of whether we are in the height of summer with guests to care for or in the quiet of November with breathing space at last. So we sit with tea, open the envelopes, and tackle the stack with the grim determination of people who know that most of it could have waited until now. It is, however, light relief from the demands of the hotel’s VAT return that needs to be done as part of the non-weekend focus of November. The snagging list of repairs and refurbishments are compiled and scheduled with trades after their pre-Christmas rush has diminished . Booking enquiries have to be handled swiftly. Our weekend month is still fair game for hotel demands!
This year, approaching a decade since we first arrived here, November has brought an additional, unexpected feeling: release. High on the attic shelves sit the remnants of a former life — Jaeger suits, city blazers, and smart shoes from careers that now feel several lifetimes away. Brand names that have all but vanished from the High Street, and so has that chapter from our lives. If these garments haven’t earned their keep in ten years, they don’t belong in our future. Letting them go feels less like discarding the past, and more like acknowledging that our lives — our real lives — are now firmly rooted here, between the hills and the sea.
November is our extended Saturday morning: unhurried, restorative, quietly joyful and full of promise. A month in part to reclaim ourselves before the wheel begins to turn again.
