It's a Hotel Life for Me

The door men, waiters and hotel staff all struck up friendships with my two children, and loved chatting to them, giving them free pastries, doing the inevitable cheek pinching. One day, whilst waiting for a house broker, A had the door man by the hand walking him up round and down the front hotel steps ad nauseam. Both perspiring but still smiling after 10 mins of this.

Housekeeping. Every day sometime in the afternoon, a guy would knock on the hotel door and says “housekeeping, is all ok?” Yes, fine I would usually reply, but one day I made the mistake of saying two light bulbs needed changing. He came in, inspected the said lightbulbs and said “ I will send for the engineer” Now I'm no DIY expert, but I was quite surprised that such a task was only fit for an engineer, who duly arrived in overalls, with his mate, also in overalls, and replaced the light bulbs, and made a hasty retreat. One didn’t work, the other blew the other 5 lights in the kitchen within 2 mins. No wonder they made a sharp exit……

Similarly the washing machine in the kitchen (we were in a hotel ‘apartment’) was beyond me. I tried every combination, couldn’t get it to start, neither (I feel I need to mention), could my husband. So of course the overalled ‘engineers’ arrived to help (in pairs again) and stood looking at the washing machine and then began to twizzle, and push buttons in an even more random way than I had. Again I realized that though not blonde they had even less idea than I had of what to do. Eventually as with Big Bang Theorists of the universe, enough random combinations had been tried to suddenly (poof!) produce life and the machine started. I made the fatal, if reasonable, request to have them explain what exactly they had done to make it work (so that I could try it and do some washing). They smiled, shrugged and pointed at the machine as if to suggest I should be impressed and grateful for their impressive practical prowess, and (Like Mr Benn) ‘as if by magic’ quickly disappeared.