Distinctly not 'Fluttering and dancing in the breeze'...

We have a selection of ties...

Invited for mid-morning coffee at the Ritz but barred entry by a gratuitously noisy mid-European Rosa Klebb type on the grounds that I was wearing a cravat, not the obligatory tie. "We have a selection of ties you can choose from..." she said huskily, her muscles rippling beneath the livery. So we decamped to the ever congenial Franco's in Jermyn Street (more of which shortly). I take the point - dress codes should be observed - but what became of the old school deference, discretion and kindliness an incorrectly dressed person would certainly have encountered at the Ritz a quarter of a century ago? And - another sign of the times - it seems faintly absurd to insist that non-residents pole up dressed like tailor's dummies in a golf club when guests who are actually staying at the Ritz (particularly Yanks, it has to be said) think nothing of shambling through the lobby in North Face anoraks and Uggs. Other areas require attention too, in particular the extremely scruffy window boxes outside the Rivoli Bar in the Ritz's Piccadilly-facing arcade. It doesn't take a Wordsworth to work out that daffodils look awful in planters. Their charm is very much of the 'here today, gone tomorrow' stamp: ablaze in a distant landscape they're one thing: in a window box they do little more than evoke a suburban roundabout. So get with it, Ritz. Fire Rosa Klebb. And get a decent, thoughtful, poetry-reading gardener to tend the boxes. Over at Franco's, the usual immaculate service - and an agreeably bizarre note in both ladies and gents lavatories - loudspeakers overhead emitting the quiet, homely but unmistakeably insistent tones of Alan Bennett reading stories from Winnie the Pooh.