Its been a month since I last jotted anything down for this Blog; its amazing how time flies, especially when you think you have so much spare. We just passed the '3 months closed' point for the poor old Triton. While we are full of hope for the future and a brand spanking new Triton, it is very hard to go through the doors in the morning and see the last vestiges of 'devastation'. All the internals are now stripped out, we even have the salvageable bits of furniture back fully cleaned now and you can't even smell any smoke on them. Hopefully the rest of The Triton Inn is going to clean up just as well!

With all the ceiling stripped out of the conservatory it really is amazing just how bright and airy it looks in there already, and the old glass rood is still in place , all browned and smoked. That is coming out in the very near future and being replaced by a nice new roof, see through and clear, in some wonderful new material that insulates heat both ways, so it wont be "hot in the Summer and cold in the winter" as it was before we put the false ceiling in a couple of years ago.

Tom Wilson-Brown

Owen Holness and Tom Wilson-Brown are just members of the Triton team who have been hard at work sorting out the other areas and we now expect to be open once again on the 14th June.  Not long to go now.  We have ordered new aluminium and timber tables and chairs for the front patio to replace the timber picnic benches - they were never very attractive to the ladies to sit at.  

It really is amazing just how expensive furniture and other room accessories have got in recent years; a simple table and four chairs costs around £600 while the fixed seating for the booths is just astronomical at over £200 per linear foot!

The best news of all is that we are now ion the final rounds of a major new hiring for The Triton, our new Head Chef. We shall be releasing more details soon but I can tell you that his food is superb, he follows our mantra of 'all fresh' ingredients, has run his own award winning restaurant.  He has worked at several Michelin starred restaurants, including a long spell with Heston Blumental. He is already hard at work on menus, but we shall be retaining the legendary Triton favourites, including our Steak Pie and fish dishes.   Hopefully that has whetted your appetite?  More very soon.

Dawn and Anne at Queensferry by the Forth bridge.

Anne has been up in Edinburgh this weekend visiting Dawn and Vince, and a couple of pandas, and they stopped off at Queensferry to look at the Forth railway bridge, one of the modern day's most remarkable structures,  now 123 years old.  I've always believed the old myth about the painters having to restart the job all over at the far end as soon as they have finished painting it, but recently I saw on as TV programme that this is now a myth of the past. A recent complete repaint saw them strip down to bare metal and apply some specially developed paint. It took a few years with all kinds of elaborate safety devices in place, mainly to stop old paint and new paint falling into the Forth below. The cost was £130 MILLION, but they are expecting it to last at least 25 years and maybe as long as 40 years.  Even so, I hope my wife is never in charge as she is bound to want to change the colour long before that!  Do take a close look at the Forth bridge if you find yourself in the Lothians or the Kingdom of Fife, it realy is a majestic sight and a true engineering wonder.