Wednesday 2nd through Sunday 6th July – Liberty Bell

When I landed the job at Piping Rock, I remember thinking “awesome, I’m going to be there for July 4th”. It didn’t take long for my mum to point out that as I was working in the hospitality business, I was almost certainly going to be working for Independence Day instead of celebrating it – but that didn’t really get my hopes down. However, at Piping Rock Club, we don’t celebrate the forth over just one day, we turn it into a five day long event called Liberty Bell, an event which we host for two other country clubs along with ours. Hence not having written for a week.
The beginning of last week was fairly quiet, with the usual lunchtime and evening shifts to deal with. It wasn’t really until Friday when things started to pick up. Despite having three days off in total this week, I still clocked up over 40 hours. Sunday was a 14 hour day, and Saturday was about 16 hours long.

This weekend I got the privilege of starting at 8am to help serve breakfast, and stayed in work to serve lunch during the middle of the day. Because Liberty Bell runs for five days and incorporates about twenty different competitions (golf, tennis, softball, bridge, backgammon, fly fishing to name but a few), a lot of members choose to stay at the club for the entire period, staying in one of the rooms that make up part of the main building. Whilst I’m sure this may be good for business, it definitely doesn’t make my job any easier over breakfast time. There was only three of us working both mornings, and in the couple of hours that I was serving for, we took about 50 orders each day.

Saturday evening was a dinner-dance affair over at the beach club, where we served dinner to about 500 people, before more people arrived to help the crowds that were already here party away into the night. I was taken home early this night because of Sunday’s 8am start, but everything’s relative during Liberty Bell, so early translated to midnight. Sunday’s breakfast was easy compared to Saturday, but this was also the day of the Wimbledon final, which meant that by about 1pm, the upstairs lounge room was packed, with every single table in view of the TV being taken by people wanting food and drink. The crowds disappeared when Federer finally lost the match, but this was at about 4pm, the time when I was meant to start work for the evening shift. So that day I worked straight through into the evening, setting up and working at the bar for the evening’s barbeque and firework show.

By the end of the shift everybody had cracked open the beers and we finally got to unwind after the longest weekend of my life by going to the closest bar/club to home, a place called Aqualounge – a bar which opened just for us that night. For Bath people reading this – I’ve finally found a place to go that’s more trashy than XL.

I'll write another blog in a day or so's time explaining what I got up to on my days off, but needless to say it has so far included sex, balls and food.