Un-boring Goring

His hotel might be ultra-posh and situated virtually in the back yard of Buckingham Palace, but Jeremy Goring, a Richard Gere lookalike whose family has owned London's The Goring hotel for 95 years, is a breath of very unstuffy air. At a lunch for him at Sydney's Quay restaurant yesterday, the resplendent-in-pink Mr. Goring kept a table of jaded travel writers in stitches with his tales of high life and low life in the hotel trade. Highest of all is his story about having to alert the security guards at Buckingham Palace each time a repairman needs to get on the roof of the hotel - the job needs to be done in five minutes, or the guards open fire. Low life? Well that would be the time Russell "Mate" Crowe attended a wake at the hotel and staggered into the bathrooms with a mob of lesser mates. George Goring, Jeremy's feisty father, was also in the bathroom and needed to wipe his hands. The aforementioned mates, high on their own testosterone, allegedly wouldn't let the older man near the towels. So the marvelous George simply fronted Russ, pulled out the ends of Russ's clean white dress shirt and wiped his hands on it. Impressed when he found out George was the owner of the hotel, Crowe started babbling about how he was going to make The Goring his London home-away-from-home. George listened to this calmly and apparently said, in the most elegant Queen's English, "Why don't you just fuck off?" And Russ has never been seen there since. Effective, no? The Goring has won my vote as the place to stay in London.