Chris Maclean: pandemonium at the pub

We have just come back from our weekly trip to the cash & carry and the florists. It is always a pleasant trip, except for the cash and carry which I loathe, and today we stopped off for a pleasant lunch. We visited a great local restaurant where our chef here appears to have plundered for ideas. There were astonishing similarities right down to the typeface on the menus and the crockery style. Inevitably we could find minor faults which I suspect is the price we must pay for running a restaurant like ours. We've sadly become food snobs and food delights we previously enjoyed are now subjected to severe critical analysis. Sad really.

Anyway we arrive back here and there is pandemonium.

I have had a telephone call from a chap in a licensing department in Surrey who has spotted that I omitted to write my National Insurance number on my TEN notice. If I do not advise them of my number within two hours the entire application will be returned here. This application is for an event in April, six months away. I dispatched my wife to find the elusive number which, for some strange reason, is written in the back of my blood donor book and which I haven't seen for years. Eventually she came up with it, bless her, and I 'phoned the council. The official was adamant it was necessary and the government required it. I didn't want to tell him eight other councils were perfectly happy without it and that, because I have been issued with a personal licence and the council required that information then, they had effectively already got access to it. I couldn't see the necessity but he wouldn't be moved. So much for the TENs being the "lighter touch" of government.

My sister in law has just come out of the restaurant fit to burst. She claims she recognises Jay Rayner, the highly influential Observer food critic, eating in our restaurant. The chef is delightfully oblivious to his presence and the meal has passed without event. We'll have to await a verdict.

Now two fire officers are here to ensure we have complied with the new self-regulatory fire risk assessment. They are going around the place asking for notices here there and everywhere and for all sorts of paperwork to be completed, filed and cross-referenced. I have left that to my sister-in-law who is far better able to cope with it.

And me? I'm hiding in my office writing this, just wanting to be left to get on with the job I do best ~ running a pub. It would be so much easier and nicer if they just left us alone to do that.