Ayrshire THE posT’s pIcTurE THE of WEEk Rozelle in the autumn

Disgraceful move

I live in Ayr and have discovered that South Ayrshire Council are sending out letters threatening to arrest wages and access bank accounts to pay council tax arrears.

Personally, I think this is a disgrace, considering what people are having to deal with.

Name and address supplied

A77poor relation

Despite being advertised in last week’s paper and on their website Amy’s roadworks on the A77 through Maybole failed to happen last weekend.

Is this another example of the A77 being the poor relation and another project taking priority?

Name and address supplied

Standforpublicoffice

In response to Mr John Dunlop’s, latest letter ( Octber 14. ) where he takes Cllr. Siobhian Brown to task for not supporting his crusade to have a Citizens’ Advice Bureau located in Ayr, at whatever cost that might be, to an already financially overstretched South Ayrshire Council.

( Just like every other Local Authority throughout the UK).

To my knowledge there are several locations where the public can seek advice, such as The Council Customer Service Centres, throughout South Ayrshire, The Trading Standards Office in River Terrace, Voluntary Action South Ayrshire also, Age Concern Ayr which provides support and advice to the elderly on a wide range of concerns.

Given Mr. Dunlop’s constant gripes and complaints on a wide range of issues to the Letters page of the Ayrshire Post, I wonder, given his wide knowledge and experience, if he has ever considered standing for public office, I am sure his talents would be of considerable benefit either in County Buildings or at Holyrood.

Alec Oattes, Lindston Place, Ayr

Ghostlygoingons This Hallowe’en don’t you just wonder, just a little, why Ayr’s always had a feeling for ghosts?

From the ghosties and ghoulies that accompany Burns’s witches and warlocks of auld Alloway Kirk, to the grey lady that walks the corridors of Auchincruive’s Oswald Hall.

Or maybe you thought you’d once met the horse- riding gentleman who tipped his hat to you as you walked near the mouth of the River Doon

– just, or so they say, before he was brutally attacked about two hundred years ago: and for what? Just a few coins in his purse? That we’ll never know, just as we’ll never know what brings a ghost from long ago to our lives today.

Some say ghosts reflect a terrible death, like a cheap “who dunnit” or perhaps the anguish someone suffered: maybe the loss of a loved one and the broken heart that follows. That’s what so many tales would have us believe, and maybe so. But then again, maybe there’s another way.

What if a place, or a building reflects all the things that go on, collecting and transmitting pieces of its time: as if it was a channel- surfing television.

Collecting memories of sounds and vision until they come together as a story to be replayed over and over.

Maybe such a place would catch the good things as well as the bad, like a spider’s web holding ideas, thoughts, and memories until the place itself becomes the ghost. That’s what made me think of Ayr Station Hotel.

Built in 1866, the Station Hotel is the grand old dame of the town, down at heel, maybe on her death bed, but wouldn’t she have tales to tell? On the death bed would she keep her thoughts and memories to herself or would she want to confess to all the things she’d done, seen and heard?

After more than a 150 years just think what those tales would be. In her 71 bedrooms, cocktail bar, dining rooms and function suites: just imagine!

All those years, all those nights for all those people add up to more than 200 lifetimes. What do 200 people get up to? Let me tell you a few……………..

Children rushing to the pre- package holiday mecca of Ayr, excited and thrilled to be at the seaside “Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad. MUM, can we go to the beach now? Can we? Can we? We want to go now!” The young couple that nervously signed in, perhaps as Mr and Mrs Smith, under the disapproving eye of the receptionist. The too confident man that signs “Mr and Mrs Smith” for himself and his secretary. The Christmas parties full of cheer and seasonal jollity until someone looks at their watch and to the surprise of his mates says “hey, it’s knocking off time”, and their smiles fade, one by one, as they muster to leave: just the same as if they were in the office from which they’ve briefly escaped.

The wedding parties of love, families and mad, majestic, ceilidhs dancing into the night.

The kiss of the young girl followed by the tearful departure of her uniformed young man, never to return from war.

The man, tired from a day at the races having lost his shirt. Maybe he did even lose his shirt!

From top hats to hard hats From bunnets to beehive hairdos From masons to mohicans From horse and cart to horse power and hybrids

Does the hotel remember? Does it count the points on the racecard, or was it a dancecard?

From jitterbug to jive and waltzes to waiting – for the question that made young hearts flutter:

Are ye’ dancin’?

Are ye’ askin’?

Today the ballroom is as silent as the memories of ballgowns glide silently across the dancefloor, but the dust remains undisturbed. In the rooms and suites above are the echoes of conversations and business presentations extolling the virtue of ……………, of what? At least the Hotel remembers. All this to be chatted about, cried over, or analysed, looking for the joke, or the deal. Of course the bar was the place for that. So packed on race day that you had to shout your order past a dozen other folk all trying to catch the barman’s eye; maybe the barmaid caught yours. Probably not, but you can dream!

Could you even see clearly across the bar? - clouded with cigarette, pipe and cigar smoke reassuringly blended with the unmistakable smells and smoke of the hard- working steam trains at the station below.

They say that even today, in the Station Hotel there are bottles in the optics and glasses on the bar, left by the final customers as the doors were shut behind them for the last time.

But what if those glasses were cleared away; only to reappear each time a tale is told, as the memories of those customers, those triumphs and disasters were recounted. Like the

triumph of a sales pitch when the salesmen wonders if the lie was spotted. But the Hotel knew. After all, the Hotel itself is one big lie. Why would anyone build it in the first place?

Why not build a hotel that reflects the grand history of castles of the Ayrshire coast? Why not build a “Culzean” hotel to greet everyone right here in the town so visitors can’t mistake where they are? But no. Instead, the Station Hotel is a confection of mock French architecture. It pretends, even now, to be a chateau from the Loire Valley, dressed in a gown of red sandstone.

It displays its pompous tower rooms, pretending to be better than the rest of us, better than the bread- and- butter hotels of the town around it.

Today the pompous hotel has been taken down a peg. Shrouded in white sheets, it awaits its fate. Its dormer windows sit in a row, like dementors in a Harry Potter story waiting to suck the last breath out of the building, with only a lone soldier, standing on the plinth in Burns Statue Square appearing to care.

The building spots the lies of promises of a new dawn; a new day of restoration and redevelopment:

because it has had all those years of practice. You get away with nothing.

All the good times and all the bad make the ghost. It’s not just some forlorn ghost of an individual that you think you see behind the old net curtains of the bedrooms. The curtains

that move, even though there’s no breeze and the doors and windows have been shut tight for so long. No, the ghost is within the building and the ghost is the building and the memories that fill it.

Do you see it at the window? Do you see how sad it is? Do you still have those good memories of the Hotel or did you leave a little sadness there? Did you leave a lie there that now makes the whole town sad? Do you still hold onto a lie that makes the Station Hotel the sad place it is? This Hallowe’en, think of the lie that is The Station Hotel and the ghost within.

Robin Szmidt, Doonfoot

Reader John Bigham, of Troon, sent us this stunning autumn picture at Rozelle. We want to see your autumn pictures. Send them to news@ ayrshirepost. co. uk