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at first, to catch all three of the separately directed articles as they begin to perform their
distinct parabolas towards the floor.
Instinct, thankfully, causes Jim to prioritise the still almost entirely full bottle as the
object most in need of his attention, and he succeeds in block-catching it - the right way
up - against the side of the television while hopping round and trying to break the fall of
the glasses with one foot (the tray is, sensibly, left to its own devices). One glass breaks;
the other two survive, bouncing off the bed and carpet. The night porter finally takes the
twenty from Jim's outstretched fingers and, snorting with barely suppressed laughter, in-
forms us he will return with another glass and a brush and pan, for the broken glass.
All of this sounds hilarious from the bathroom; I start laughing quietly to myself and
I'm still giggling when the night porter arrives with the brush and pan and replacement
glass. I find myself going, 'Hoo-hoo-hoo.' (pause) 'Hoo-hoo-hoo,' a lot.
I think there must have been some sort of positive feedback thing going on with the
echo in the tiled bathroom, because after a while I'm laughing as much at the sound of
my own laughter as at the scene I've had to create in my head from the sounds coming
through the door.
'You okay in there, Banksie?' Dave asks.
'Hoo-hoo-hoo,' I tell him. 'Pretty much.' I wipe my eyes. 'Was that another example
of Brownian motion I heard there?'
'Oh yes.'
'The fog, Banksie,' Jim says. 'It was the fog.'
'The what?' Dave asks.
'The fog,' I tell him. 'The Force Of Gravity. Was ever thus. Hoo-hoo-hoo.'
'You finished in that fuckin bog, Banksie, or you having a bath or something? I'm
dyin for a slash.'
'Hoo-hoo-hoo. On my way out. Hoo-hoo-hoo.'
The bottle of wine does nothing to make the incident any less funny over the next half
hour or so, and I keep bursting into giggles.
'Hoo-hoo-hoo!'
Jim sighs. 'Well, at least he's not being tetchy.'
'Hoo-hoo-hoo!'
'I don't know.' Dave shakes his head.
'Hoo-hoo-hoo!'
'I think I preferred the tetchiness.'
I am definitely not laughing the next morning when two bad things happen (before I get
into this I better report that the buffet breakfast was very good and I bumped into a friend
of Les's who was there for a union conference). The lesser of the two bad things is that
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