We have endured tiny glasses at hotel breakfasts for too long. Here is my proposed solution

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In Nobody Needs This, a new series for The Journal, Emer McLysaght focuses her eagle eye on the trends, products and notions we can do without. It’s not all giving out, however. She’ll also be keeping up with what’s catching her attention, keeping people interested and, quite frankly, driving her mad.

THE FAMOUS QUOTE about ‘water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink’ is, like so many famous quotes, incorrect.

It originates from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the text actually reads:

‘Water, water, every where/ And all the boards did shrink;/Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink.’

The sentiment is the same. It conjures up images of a sailor perishing from thirst on a vessel far from land, while the undrinkable salty seawater all around mocks him.

I know the feeling. I was recently in the UK for a wedding on one of the hottest weekends of the year. I awoke the morning after in my B&B, more parched than a front garden lawn during a hosepipe ban. As I staggered to the breakfast room, cursing the free bar and trying to prise my lips from my teeth I silently prayed to whatever deity might be out there and listening: please, anything but the tiny thimble glasses. Anything but those.

The gods were not listening. Laid out beside a jug of orange juice and another of apple juice were glasses so small that they must have come from a doll’s house; so small that I wondered for a moment if I was on a hidden camera show. I poured myself a thimble of orange juice, eyes resting maniacally on the generous mugs provided for tea and coffee and weighing up how deranged I would look if I filled one up with juice. Only the Germans at a nearby table were already eyeing me, wild-haired and sunken-eyed, with trepidation, I might have gone for it. I could practically smell the water in the cold tap in the forbidden kitchen on the other side of the swinging door, feeling, as Coleridge’s mariner did, my tongue ‘withered at the root’.

If I was opening a hotel – a scenario which is hypothetical in the extreme. Can we please STOP BUILDING HOTELS? – my central selling point would be ‘We have pint glasses at the breakfast buffet’. Nothing about pillow menus or spa facilities or award-winning chefs, just a promise of extreme hydration alongside the bain maries of sausages and hash browns. I would provide endless vats of water, both still and sparkling, and a variety of juices and soft drinks. It would be the ultimate loss-leader, and people would come from far and wide to visit and marvel at the wondrous bounty.

‘But what about waste?’, I hear you scream. Well, I would offer three sizes of glass: small, medium and pint, and I would have a slightly passive-aggressive sign asking people to only take what they need. I would also operate a strict ‘no cucumber in the water’ policy, for I believe nobody has ever taken a sip and said to themselves, ‘Do you know what this delicious water needs? A sinister undertone of cucumber’. If there was a clamour, I would provide optional slices for the cucumber perverts.

The tiny water glasses at hotels are nothing new. We’ve been enduring the practice for decades. First, you carry out the ritual of ceremoniously placing your phone and room key card on the table to reserve it before humbly joining the juice queue to fill three miniscule Fisher-Price thimbles, knowing they’ll be mostly empty by the time you get back to your seat, and a return journey will be necessary.

Where the insidious tiny glass trend has really taken hold is in ‘nice’ restaurants. You know the type. The tables are tiny, the menu is all small plates which won’t fit on the tiny tables in the quantities the establishment recommends you order, and the glasses are microscopic and ‘chic’. On that same wedding trip I was in such a restaurant in London and ordered a large bottle of sparkling water (I know, very posh) and not only were we given comically small glasses, the server kept taking the bottle of water away so he could do the refilling himself. Well, he was over and back like the Holyhead ferry. Eventually I politely requested that he either leave the bottle or bring bigger glasses. He left the bottle. Give us bigger glasses you cowards!

I once again beseech you not to fall into the trap of buying mountains of seasonal décor and tat as the summer turns to autumn. You don’t need a ‘cosy season’ sweatshirt any more than you need 23 tiny pumpkins to dot around your house. You definitely don’t need seasonal bedding. I saw a chilling post this week on Vinted where someone was selling crumpled orange sheets ‘used once, for Halloween’.

Emer will be back next Friday morning with more recommendations.

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