Couple Floored By "Lesbian" Birthday Meal Receipt

Being handed the receipt at the end of an extravagant meal is often a blow. We'd planned to stick to two courses and have just the one drink – but then we made the rash decision to actually enjoy ourselves. Whoops! Rarely does a receipt personally offend us, however.

So spare a thought for Belinda Mulcah and Jo Sheperd, who were celebrating Mulcah's birthday at a North Wales restaurant when they received a rude awakening. Printed at the top of their bill beneath their table number – in capital letters, no less – was the word "lesbians", DIVA magazine reported.

The couple were staying with a relative at the Hafan y Môr Holiday Park in Pwllheli, North Wales, when the discriminatory occurrence took place. Prior to that, they'd been having a “perfectly nice, perfectly lovely” time.

“Belinda looked at me and she said, ‘Are you alright?’ I showed her and she was speechless," Sheperd told DIVA. "We hadn’t done anything overt. We hadn’t been kissing at the bar or holding hands. We could have been friends. We could have been relations. We could have been a whole host of things. So the fact he decided to identify us as lesbians was a bit horrifying. We were shocked at how stupid this man had been.”

Even worse, when the couple complained to the bar manager, he tried to take back the receipt – as if trying to hide the evidence – before atoning them with free drinks. “As if that was going to make it ok,” Sheperd said.

“It doesn’t make [what happened] better in any shape or form,” adding that she "[didn't] know what upon earth possessed the staff member a) to write it and b) to hand me the receipt with it on.”

The Hafan y Môr Holiday caravan park, which is one of 36 managed by Bourne Leisure Group, offered its “sincere apologies to the guests involved”, said it shouldn't have happened and that it was "sorry for any distress caused".

A spokesperson from the resort told DIVA: “Following an investigation conducted by management, the individual concerned has been subject to internal disciplinary action. Our team members will also undertake refreshed training courses to ensure that an incident like this does not occur in the future.”