Thoughts for Friday – 8th May 2015

My new job role has seen me travel extensively across the country for the last few weeks. My final destination for April was a town called Burgess Hill, not too far from Brighton, a place which is a lot of fun when the weather is warm and the sun is shining and less so when it’s cold, windy, and raining.

I left early on the Monday and had assumed that the journey would take perhaps 90 minutes by car. I found that I’d sorely underestimated how long it would take to arrive at my destination and this was primarily to do with the fact that the route I would need to take had at least 25 roundabouts to contend with. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against roundabouts (or circular traffic islands, if you like) per se, I just have an issue when 20-odd of the sodding things are within a five-mile radius of each other. Surely the Ancient Romans had the right idea by building roads in a straight line, thus negating the need for wibbly-wobbly, faffy bits of road with hairpin bends and dozens of roundabouts?

Can you tell that these hideous concrete constructions irk me a little?

I arrived at my destination at least an hour later than I had expected and questioned the sanity of my colleague who had booked the accommodation for the both of us when my eyes fell on what looked like a dilapidated old public house (for my American readers: think ‘bar’). It turns out that my first impression was pretty accurate when I finally checked in and accessed my room.

This is how I woke up each morning after a freezing night of sleep

Firstly, the lock on my door was unpredictable at best and only locked when it wanted to, thus sometimes locking me in and/or out of my room. I then found out that the bathroom window did not fully close (allowing the cold air to enter my room), the TV didn’t work, my gas central heating only tended to operate when I was not in my room, there was no hot water in the shower, and that I had a wall-sized mirror in my room that wasn’t actually fixed to any of the walls. I then had visions of the thing falling on me in the middle of the night and this wouldn’t have seemed so bad had the staff at the pub actually bothered to enter my room on a daily basis to do simple housekeeping tasks such as make the bed and remove used cups and saucers etc. At first I assumed that room service was not part of the package, until my colleague gleefully told me that his room had been attended to every single day…

On the second night we drove into Brighton to marvel at its beach (which was full of stones and not sand) and its famous pier. Lets go and have a look around, we thought, until we realised that the pier was closing and that if we entered we’d likely be locked in for the night. Deciding against being locked in on a freezing cold pier, we then went in search of somewhere to eat. The fact that my colleague suggested a ‘gentleman’s’ club by accident shall forever remain our secret…

In the end we found a quaint little Italian restaurant and ordered pizzas all round (as you do). The only issue was that we were sat on the table closest to the window which meant that people walking past could see us eating our food. This worked both ways though as we could sit and watch the alarming amount of inebriated people stumble towards the pier and laugh when they tripped and/or fell. The drunk to sober ratio of people in Brighton must have been somewhere close to 5:1 that night and I wonder if this is a usual occurrence for a Tuesday night or just because my colleague and I were in town.

If I thought things at our overnight accommodation couldn’t get any worse, then I was very much mistaken when I ordered an evening meal from their ‘specials’ menu. Well, if serving lukewarm-cold food is a speciality, they really hit the mark with what they presented to me that night. I felt awkward and embarrassed when I had to ask for it to be taken away. The staff apologised profusely but still saw fit to charge me for the meal itself when I settled my bill that night.

I won’t publicly shame the establishment in which I stayed, but it is fair to say that, next time I’m delivering sessions in the local vicinity, I won’t be staying there again…