Bad hair day

Last weekend I got to stay in a hotel. Unfortunately, it wasn't the kind of hotel where they turn down the sheets for you and leave chocolates on the pillow. It was the kind of hotel where they have a prefabricated plastic bathroom "compartment" in the corner of the bedroom. The shower is of a generous enough size, but the bathroom... not so much.

It was the kind of hotel where you wake up at 5.30 in the morning because of loud squeaking and thudding. I peered around in the gloom and was relieved that I was alone. People were having sex in another room.

A little later, feeling a little sleep-deprived, I got up and started getting ready. The first thing that went wrong was that my bottle of shampoo fell in the toilet. There was a 50-50 chance of it falling either on the tiny bit of floor or in the toilet. What's a girl to do? Ring reception? Sticking your hand in the toilet is one way to wake up quickly.

After closing the lid of the toilet and showering, the next thing on the agenda was the tedious, daily task of straightening my hair. At some point during the process, I lost my grip on the straighteners. Luckily, my reflexes were working and I managed to catch them in mid-air — only to drop them again very quickly when I realized that they were very, very hot. They clattered to the floor loudly. I may have said a few bad words at this point. I ran lots of cold water over my fingers. For a long time.

Still in pain, I got back to the job of straightening my hair. But the straighteners wouldn't open. I couldn't get my hair between the hot bit and the clamp bit. I looked in the mirror. Half my hair was lovely and sleek, and the other half looked like Jon Bon Jovi's hair back in the 80s. I couldn't go down to breakfast looking like that!

I started to panic, and then I started to sweat. Whenever I said I was sweating when I was a child, my dad would say, "Horses sweat, men perspire and ladies glow." So, glowing like a sweating horse, I grabbed the towel, wrapped it round my hand and tried to bend the straighteners back into shape. It worked! I had repaired them.

Only 20 minutes later, I was having breakfast with my colleagues. One of them told us about someone he knew who had been boasting about staying in a fancy hotel. He had said, "I stayed at the Hilton. It was just so... Hilton," thus implying that he stayed there on a regular basis and was all too familiar with the service and ambience you get at that sort of hotel. I then told them about my morning so far. We agreed that it was not very Hilton.