I’m tired, and in the bar at the Britannia Docklands hotel - it’s 10:21 PM, and I’ve been up since 5 AM. In that time, I’ve travelled from Wales to London Paddington, and then across London to Canary Wharf, where I worked hard all day until 6 PM. After work, I went to a job interview in a hotel near the Excel center, and then I went back to work to pick up my things. By the time I checked into the hotel, it was 9 PM. Not ridiculously late perhaps, but late enough to make a bar meal the only sensible option. The jacket potato I ordered was dry, and cutting its skin with the smooth knife they supplied was not an easy task. At least the Bolognese with which it was stuffed was nice.

(The interview seemed to go quite well by the way. If they offer me the position, I may well take it.)

My room is quite nice – a twin, so it’s really big, although each bed is only a single, which isn’t so nice when you’re well over six feet tall. This is a funny hotel. Every week I come here, and every week they act as if they’ve never seen me before. I’m obviously not one of those really memorable people. “Your room is on the fourth floor – the lifts are behind you to your right. Breakfast is served between 7 and 10 yada yada yada” – I get the whole spiel every single time.

The hotel has fourteen floors. The top floor (floor thirteen, as the fourteenth is the basement) is reserved for the suites. Sometimes, randomly, they put me up there for some inexplicable reason. It’s meant to be a treat – a touch of luxury. It’s not though. The floor has its own lift (the main lifts extend only as far as floor 12), and as it is so separate from the other lifts, it tends to be used as a service elevator. Invariably, when summoning the thing from the thirteenth floor, you are faced with a ten-minute wait followed by a ride with a trolley full of cleaning equipment. It ruins the whole effect.

The last time I stayed here, I was woken up by my room phone ten minutes before my alarm was set to go off. Do you have any idea how annoying that is? After a couple of minutes of me and the pidgin-English-speaking bloke on the phone going “Hello?” to each other, I managed to work out that he thought I’d rang housekeeping. I assured him that I had not, whereupon he apologised and hung up. It was too late then, of course. I couldn’t go back to sleep, and was too disturbed even to lie there repeatedly hitting “snooze” (a favourite pastime of mine).

Before that, the last time I’d stayed was the time my Dad woke me up, ringing to tell me my mum had died. So when the housekeeping guy rang, lots of things went through my mind before I picked up - that’s why I couldn’t go back to sleep. Tonight, I’m going to unplug the phone.