Hotel life – at your inconvenience

Quick! More cushions!

I’ve recently spent a couple of nights in a hotel. Obviously, it was awful. Not calamitously bad or anything, just irritatingly not quite right.

Once the fundamentals had been dealt with, like; ‘Is it clean?’, ‘Are there spiders?’ and ‘Are you sure there aren’t any spiders?’ the experience was a journey into crushing disappointment and frustrated inconvenience.

The plug sockets were apparently deliberately installed by a maniacal electrician with a degree in evil. They knew how to place them precisely in entirely the right place to render them either inaccessible or useless.

Could I plug my phone in by the bed and use it as a clock so I could see exactly what time it was when I was awoken by another guest noisily using their loo? No. Any future visits to waterfalls will remind me of the horror.

The gap under the room’s door was so wide, even a moderately competent limbo dancer would have had no problem squeezing underneath. We had to line up the copious cushions from the bed across the gap. On the plus side, should we have lost our key, I think we could have still got in if we wriggled enough.

How do they make hotel rooms so hot? The radiators weren’t on and the windows were open. Explain that, and the planet’s energy problems are solved.

This was definitely the softest mattress ever. I don’t just mean in my hotel-staying experience. I mean ever made. We were lucky to get out alive without a winch and pulley system.

The early fire alarm was a highlight. I thought seriously about going outside naked, but figured I didn't really have enough time to get undressed again first.

Was the crockery from a doll’s house? If I had put all the hot chocolate sachet’s contents into the cup, there wouldn’t have been enough space for the hot water. I'd have to have poured it in my mouth and spooned the powder in. I'm pretty sure that would constitute a health and safety violation... but only if I'd actually been able to find a socket I could plug it into which was sufficiently near the table.

What's ‘continental’ about a micro-packet of cornflakes? (Other insufficiently filling breakfast cereals were also available.)

Of course, not everything is within the hotel. Who doesn't want to be awoken at 6.30am by the pastoral sounds of a beer delivery lorry and last night's empties being cleared out by staff expertly trained to find the optimal way to make as much noise as possible, solely through the medium of empty bottles? And yes I did become fully aware that "This vehicle is reversing". Unless they were driving it up the stairs to the first floor (or there's was a very large lift I hadn't spotted) the only risk was me subsequently overdosing on coffee trying to stay awake during the day.

Still, when asked, I said I'd had a lovely stay and everything was fine – I am British, after all.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in The Mail, on the 18th of August 2017. The version used on their website retained the title, whilst the print edition went with "A hell of a hotel break".

Unusually, this one was drafted out on my phone, sat on a bench outside the hotel, on a warm morning (you could tell I wasn't in Cumbria, right?). A re-write and some additions on returning home and voila! o- ne grumbly column. The picture is genuinely from our hotel room... it was a fire door. Presumably it's called that as it would have been very good at spreading fire.

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