When I joined Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, as it then was, in 1989, one of the big issues was service. When I moved into newspapers in 1996, service was still a big issue. Then when I joined The Times a couple of years later, it was still an issue. A quarter of a century later, astonishingly, service remains as much an issue as ever.

How did I make this brilliant deduction? By spending my 30th wedding anniversary in Tunbridge Wells. Don’t get me wrong, the service at the town’s hotels, pubs and restaurants was not universally bad. Take the Hotel du Vin, where my wife and I stayed the night. Here the service was friendly and helpful. Staff had that knack of knowing when we needed something quickly and efficiently.

Our meanderings around the town, especially the famous Pantiles, were another story. Over the course of the weekend we spent in Tunbridge Wells, we walked out of three establishments due to exasperation. Indeed, it was remarkable how many different ways the waiting staff of the spa town found to exasperate us.

The first episode was in the Pantiles, where we were looking for somewhere informal to get a couple of glasses of fizz. A manager-type sat us down outside and handed us a menu. It wasn’t that busy, so we quickly decided on champagne and waited to give our order….and waited….and waited….and continued waiting for a good 15 minutes. All of which time the young lady who’d seated us spent chatting with a colleague or simply avoiding our gaze. As they clearly didn’t want the £28 we would have been happy to spend, we beat a hasty retreat.

So then, a bit further along, we stopped outside the Tunbridge Wells Hotel, where a very nice waitress immediately asked if she could help, sat us down and took our order for two glasses of a French crémant (and the most delicious olives and breads) for much less than we’d been ready to spend at the first bar. The young man who brought everything out was clearly not a professional, more likely a student, but his friendly smile and polite service was a joy. To add to the pleasure of the occasion, a couple sang a succession of toe-tapping tunes right outside the hotel.

The following morning resulted in a similarly mixed series of experiences. At the first café we entered – a Caffè Nero - we wanted a couple of flat whites. Given how relatively quiet it was, we felt optimistic of achieving our goal. But the only person who appeared to be working that morning was busy laboriously preparing fruit drinks for a party of four. It wasn’t the barista’s fault, but the fruit drink was clearly not an easy or quick beverage to prepare. As it gradually turned into a recipe for a disaster, we upped and left.

At our next venue - the Ivy - we actually experienced swift service right up until we handed in our order for couple of coffees. Or order was swiftly taken…. then the wait began….and continued. It soon became obvious that we’d been forgotten so up we stood and off we went. We wandered along the street for a few minutes before swinging back the way we’d come and as we approached the Ivy again we saw a waitress with a couple of coffees on her tray, clearly wondering where we were. It was way, way too late, however.

So we walked back towards the Hotel du Vin and en route found a decidedly cool café, that also had the advantage of being a bit cheaper than the big chains.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware how staff can become inadvertently distracted or bring the wrong dish or simply be having a bad day and not feel like smiling. For any number of reasons, otherwise excellent staff can sometimes simply fall short of what’s required. Perhaps, we were being over-curmudgeonly on our trip to Tunbridge Wells, and on another occasion I would probably have been happy to give these establishments and their staff the benefit of the doubt.

The era of robots, AI or whatever else ends up taking the place of human beings has yet to arrive to any meaningful extent and I’d be very surprised if I’m not having the same conversation on service for many years to come.

Let’s hope the speed of service at Domino’s Pizza Group does not suffer under its new CEO, Andrew Rennie. He spent more than two decades at Domino’s Pizza Enterprises, the Sydney-listed Domino’s franchisee, and had been hotly tipped to take over from David Wild as chief executive of its London-listed cousin as long ago as 2019.

Although industry sources had claimed at the time that Rennie was in prime position to take the helm at the UK-listed group, Domino’s Pizza Enterprises insisted that there was “no substance to that speculation”.

At the time, Rennie said: “As a senior executive in this business and a significant holder of [Domino’s Pizza Enterprises] shares, I am invested in our future and look forward to delivering on the growth plans we have outlined to the market.”

The four-year gap between Rennie being approached about the UK job and him actually being appointed to it is definitely unusual, but it is not hard to work out the scenario. We can assume that DPE proffered sweeteners to persuade him to stay on, but when Dominic Paul took the UK job in 2019 only to quit last year to take the Whitbread CEO job, Rennie clearly realised that he could not let the UK job slip through his hands again.