I am once again sitting in my hotel room and writing on the interblogs while I wait for (e:dragonlady7) to get back from practice with the London Rollergirls. I've just been on a very, very long walk on my own so I'm enjoying some tea and Jaffa cakes while my feet go on strike for a little bit.

[Regent's Park, by the way, is enormous. It is so large that if Regent's Park were a meatball, Queen Mary's Garden would be a complete hard-boiled-egg park inside of it, an entire snack in its own right but in this case used merely as a filling. ]

London is a very expensive place, so we are staying at a sort-of discount hotel. It's nothing as terrible as the Blue Dolphin - the room is clean, the proprietors are friendly, and we have our own bathroom. They're not charging L150/night largely due to our location [a half-mile from the tube], the size of our room [large enough to fit a queen-size bed with enough room left over for a teapot], and the fact that our gigantic ground-floor window brings us all the light and traffic noise of midday conveniently throughout the night. Still, it's much better than it could be, and far better than I was expecting.

Our first night we got in at 12:30, stinking like travel, only to discover we'd been shorted some [ok, all] towels. B used her t-shirt; I used the bathmat. The next morning, there was some discussion: does L70 a night even get us towels?

And then there was the slight problem that B broke our bed doing nothing acrobatic I promise. There is a little ledge that runs around the inside of the bed frame, which holds up a piece of plywood, which holds up the mattress [which, for all intents and purposes, is yet another piece of plywood]. The ledge at the foot of the bed broke off, so that if you sat at the foot and put just the right amount of weight in just the right place, the head of the mattress would flip up [I told you it was firm].

Which brings us to the proprietors. They remind me in many ways of a few Upstanding Businessmen I knew in New Jersey - polite enough, but with the kind of thick, indistinguishable accent that says 'please don't fuck with me because you can't even imagine what we're fronting here.' And here we were, complaining about towels that were Mysteriously Missing and the bed we totally busted.

When we brought the manager over to our room, we found that in our absence the maid had given us towels [probably reporting us to the klepto police] and removed the broken bed piece [probably reporting us to the sex maniac police]. Despite thinking we're total dipwads, the manager sent some people in to fix the bed, and everything's all smoothed over.

At least I thought it was. When I came back from my walk I swear I heard him mutter under his breath: 'I hate you.'

next episode: gaydar

- Z