to society. Your wood pigeon is virtually a saint. It makes a nice noise, and it is pretty. Also in a pie it’s OK. Racing pigeons are the greyhounds of the sky, noble beasts of the air who could find a pin in the Gobi Desert if, for some reason, they wanted to. But city pigeons are vile. Airborne sewers with guano so toxic it will burn through the paintwork of your car like bird’s arse napalm.
Flying rats, you say? Hardly. People would pay money to see a flying rat. Aerodynamically graceful, sleek and with a wavy tail, a flying rat might be fun to see. A rat has character, it’s a rat, not just a non-flying pigeon. Pigeons, on the other hand, are crap. Leaving aside the hereditary syphilis thing or whatever that is, they ought to be Cockney doves of the air, surviving on a diet of jellied eels and olive branches in the mean city streets. But they’re not. They’re brickthick, filthy, one-toed nerks. They’re not actually animals, they’re machines designed for turning birdseed into guano. Good skill there, pigeon chappy.
… pigeons will come along and empty their bowels over everything and everyone
And as for those old women who have nothing better to do than go out and spread the contents of their breadbins all over your local green space so that pigeons will come along and empty their bowels over everything and everyone – wouldn’t you just love to see one of those old dears feeding the pigeons one sunny morning and suddenly an umarked van screech up, the doors fly open and four masked men leap out, throw her in the back and she’s never seen again?
Better than a fine, any day of the week.
‘It’s the idea that thousands of potentially incontinent businessmen or absent-minded serial killers have stayed here before you.’
Hotel rooms are like real rooms, only about nine times pokier and a hundred times more depressing. There’s something deeply gloomy about staying in a hotel. Possibly it’s the idea that thousands of potentially incontinent businessmen or absent-minded serial killers who just may have forgotten to take the severed head out of the safe when they left have stayed here before you. Possibly it’s the ambience, that strange dim hotel room atmosphere which is part East German brothel in a spy movie and part overdressed cabin on a gay trawler. And possibly it’s simply the knowledge that doing anything apart from opening the window will cost you a fortune; the minibar, the phone, the pay TV – if they could find a way to put a meter on the chocolate on the pillow they would.
Awful places. For a start, they’re often beige which is depressing. Instead of shampoo and soap and toothpaste, they have ‘toiletries’. Toiletries are the smallest amounts of shampoo, soap and toothpaste that can actually be held. (Despite this, after you’ve used them, there’s always some left which has to be either thrown away or drunk by the manager).
The shower curtain is made of some special clinging plastic which moulds itself to the shape of your cold wet body and allows the shower to spray the whole room with water. Which in turn forces you to mop it all up with the tiny towels they’ve provided for your face. (You can’t use the big towels because of ‘ecology’. See HOTEL TOWELS) And they think it’s posh to have a phone in the bathroom. Handy, that, when you’re in the shower. Who phones people from the shower? Norman Bates? ‘Hi, I can’t talk, I’m stabbing someone to death. Please leave a message after the scary violins.’
Hotels already cost a fortune to stay in, but it’s not enough for the ‘hoteliers’, as they call themselves only because they don’t know the French for ‘thieving bastards in cheap suits’, to overcharge you, they have to go one worse step further. Go into the bathroom and you will find a little sign, generally placed near the shower curtain. This sign will say something like this:
HELP PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT! TO PREVENT UNNECESSARY USE OF WATER AND ENVIRONMENTALLY DAMAGING DETERGENTS, WE ASK YOU TO REUSE YOUR TOWELS
There are two things you can do here. One is be a big old wimp and carefully dry yourself with little sections of the towel so as to prevent the Brazilian rainforests from tumbling into the mighty ocean. And the other is to dry yourself on every single scrap of cloth in the room, including the curtains and the shoe-polishing cloth, and then put this sign up next to their one.
I AM THE ENVIRONMENT AND I AM SICK OF BEING BLAMED FOR THE FACT THAT YOU BASTARDS CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO WASH YOUR TOWELS EVERY DAY. I DON’T COME ROUND YOUR HOUSE AND TELL YOU TO REUSE YOUR FACE FLANNELS SO LEAVE ME ALONE. P.S. I HAVE STOLEN THE DRESSING GOWN AND THE WEIRD FLAT SLIPPERS.
That should do the trick.
Leaving aside the thorny issue of pay TV – you’ve already paid the hotel enough money to buy your own television set, and now they want to charge you so you can watch Star Wars IX: Mission To Moscow or some other old rubbish you wouldn’t even get out on DVD if Hollywood burned to the ground tomorrow – what the hell are they doing giving themselves their own channel? And ‘TV’ itself is a pretty loose description of something that’s in fact nothing more than a photograph of a simpleton in a bellboy’s uniform with the words written over his face in the kind of typeface that is normally reserved for wedding invitations. They could be using the channel to show something useful, like where the local pubs are or how to fiddle the mini-bar.
Welcome to the Grandisson Edwarditorian
The word here is ‘key’. Metal thing, round at one end, squiggly at the other. Goes in a keyhole, you turn it and the door opens. Easy. That’s a key. What’s not a key is this; a piece of plastic the size and shape of a credit card with some little holes in it that you put in a slot in a door and hope the green light goes ‘beep’ and you don’t have to go all the way back down to reception for another piece of plastic that doesn’t work either.
The sound, not of hell, because that would be at least exciting, but of grey. Muzak is what zombies listen to in their dead cars. It’s a depressing trickle of onanising strings from a cheap speaker mounted somewhere above your head like a security camera that, instead of recording crime, emits it.
Tipping is one of the greatest evils known to man. The case for it is a simple one; people in menial jobs do not earn enough money. This is true. There can be nothing worse than going round cleaning up after people, dragging heavy objects around and so forth for minimum wages. Only a fool or a sadist would say that this is a good thing. However, this is not your fault. You are not personally