Well here’s an inspirational yarn for the ages. A Canadian man who was banned from a ritzy hotel in British Columbia back in 2001 for accidentally allowing dozens of seagulls to trash his suite has finally achieved justice and had his ban lifted.
Friends, yes. According to the CBC, The Fairmont Empress in Victoria banned Nick Burchill 17 years ago for an unfortunate incident in which he left a bunch of pepperoni sitting out on his hotel room windowsill, which – shock horror – brought a frankly unsustainable number of hungry seagulls directly into the suite.
Burchill was on a business trip, and the pepperonis – a Halifax delicacy – were intended for some of his old navy mates. After leaving the offending meats near the window to cool in the chilly April air, he went for a stroll. What he returned to was, quite frankly, unspeakable.
I don’t mean just a couple of seagulls. I can only estimate how many there were. I’m thinking somewhere between 30 and 40 seagulls had come in through this open window while I was gone. And I would have never thought of that because the East Coast seagulls aren’t that brazen. They’d never come into a room or do that sort of thing — at least I don’t think they would.
As you might imagine, they had made a fair mess of the room over the past few hours of their bacchanalian pepperoni orgy.
The seagulls were flying everywhere and they had been there for a long time eating Brothers TNT Pepperoni, so you can imagine what the room looked like even before I came back. And now we’ve got seagulls flying around, the curtains are falling down, the lamps are falling down. It was a real mess.
Burchill’s employer had booked the room, and though he said the staff were nice about it all, a letter was sent to his employer informing them they would no longer be permitted to stay at The Empress in future. All because of a mere seagull-related indiscretion.
Well, a Facebook post from Burchill has confirmed that in 2018, 17 years after the unspeakable incident in question, he returned to The Empress to make amends. Apparently, the seagull attack had become something of a local legend among hotel staffers, despite the fact few if any employees from that era remained with the hotel.
“I just apologised,” he says. “I was forgiven. I left them a present of about a pound of Brothers TNT Pepperoni as a peace offering.”
Beautiful. You can read Burchill’s full account from Facebook below:
