Hell is waking up hungover in a hotel room after drinking copious amounts of alcohol. At 5am. When you’ve got to be up in a couple of hours. For an important meeting.
With an unquenchable thirst due to sleeping in an air conditioned room, I stumble and fumble my way toward the en-suite bathroom, cursing the decision to leave the light off (why didn’t I just flip the switch?). I came to what I thought was the entrance, stubbed my toe into the skirting board and banged my knee against the doorframe.
Hobbling into the bathroom, I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror, and nearly die of shock, realising that I do indeed look like the living dead. Blood shot eyes and the deep black bags around them only remind me of last night’s excesses. Eventually large gulps of water relieve the thirst, once I’ve realised how to get the tap water to come out cold. Which takes me about five minutes in this luxury bathroom.
It’s time to get into bed, but now I’m awake in a foreign bed, in a foreign hotel room. I can’t sleep and all I can think about is tomorrow morning’s (well this morning's, really) meeting and the reason why I’m in a hotel room in the first place. Of course it feels like hours since I woke-up but it’s probably only been about five minutes.
I wake up a few hours later, after sporadic short naps. The bed was almost too comfortable for me and my middle class ways, perhaps next time they should put me up in a hotel more attuned to my style of living. I kept feeling like a phoney for having a massive double bed, thousands of pillows and a proper duvet.
The hangover is now in full-on mode reaching it’s peak and pounding my brain like an American soldier a detainee in Guantanamo Bay. I stumble into the shower, spend far too long in there, then get out. The room is silent, and I decide to turn on the TV. Desperately still trying to sober up before this morning’s meeting, I drink copious amounts of tea, coffee and water and whatever else is in the complimentary basket.
Out comes BBC Breakfast news, the headline story is about how the government want to encourage schools to organise trips for their pupils. All I can think about is my headache and the fact that there is civil war in Iraq and Russian spies (allegedly) roaming the streets executing the Kremlin’s unwanted, yet the BBC bypassed these stories to focus on kids trips and included a live link-up to a group of 12 year olds going out canoeing. Breaking news indeed.
They should have recreated a school trip gone wrong, now that would indeed be news: "The kids screamed as they plunged hundreds of feet to their death after the bus driver, drunk on Absinthe and who was being pleasured by their teacher at the time, careered off the mountain pass. All 80 children, the bus driver, and an illegal immigrant who crept into the luggage hold are dead. Back to you in the studio Dick."
So the only thing left to do is to put the channel on one of the hotel’s pre-set radio stations. The trouble is that the only one that is working is BBC Radio Two, Britain’s most popular radio station. Popular almost always = annoying, brainless and dull. And BBC Radio Two is no exception. The breakfast presenter is a certain Terry Wogan, but before I get his pleasantries, I get a the joys of Emma Bunton’s (previously known as Baby Spice) version of ‘Downtown’. And it’s fucking pitiful. Terry Wogan then cracks some piss-poor jokes and starts reading out listener's lymrics and poems. I felt the violent urge to go round to the BBC straight away to slap the four hundred year old presenter senseless. Other musical joys of this wise and sage DJ include ‘That’s the Way I like it’ by Casey & the Sunshine Band, and ‘Club at the End of the Street’ by Elton John. My tether is nearly at an end, and I almost burst into tears at the horror.
Regaining composure, I decide to iron my shirt, which has, of course, become crumpled in my bag on the way to this regional UK city. Thankfully, the good people at the hotel have thought of everything and provided me with an iron and board. However, after I’ve set it all up, it spits hot water at me, I rush to the ensuite to get some cold water on my hands, and trip over the ironing board and send the iron flying, when it lands it starts to slowly burn a hole in the carpet. It’s at this moment that Linda Rondstadt comes over the radio with ‘Do What You Gotta Do’ singing those very words and I feel like shouting ‘I AM TRYING TO, YOU STUPID COW’. I feel like I’m living my very own ‘Fear and Lothing’ moment.
Of course, I eventually made myself presentable, wondered downstairs, checked-out. The meeting went fine and the trip home is a breeze. And by the evening I was begining to wonder what all the fuss was about. But in those short few hours from 5am to 9am, the whole world was crumbling around me and I wondered how on earth I was going to get away with it.
Note to self: contact large international hotel chain proposing a new drunk-proof room.
Went to see the Gypsy
Today while taking a fag break at work, I saw a disgusting sight. A pigeon was happily eating away at a pile of mouldy vomit that someone had kindly left on the pavement for someone else to clean-up. It was a vision that encapsulates two problems with London. Firstly, the pigeon population. They are evil vermin and flying rats and should be killed to stop the spread of disease. They also abuse children, as the photo shows. Secondly, our binge drinking problem. How many piles of sick do you regularly see in the street on the way home from a nice Saturday night down the pub? It's a frigtening thought, I wonder how many piles (or litres) of vomit are cleaned up on London's streets every year? I don't know the answer but it's probably loads.
