Things not included in your Travelodge room

To be turned out of your bed by a fire alarm is bad enough, especially at gone 11pm.

But it’s really taking the biscuit when it happens again at 8am the following morning, when you were intending on having a lie-in to make up for last nights disruption.

Last night it was someone smoking, they obviously ignored the signs in all the corridors, lifts and rooms that said “No Smoking”, but I don’t think they were expecting the full Travelodge fury of a £200 fine and being kicked out of the hotel.

With that having taken place so publically, you would have thought that nobody would have risked anything setting the smoke alarms off again.

But no, this morning off go the alarms, and the reason – someone burning their breakfast.

This would be just about reasonable if it had been in the cafe bar, but no, they were attempting to cook breakfast in their room.

Travelodge is a hotel chain, not self-catering apartments.

All the duty manager could do was shake their head, expect signs shortly letting you know that you can’t cook in the lifts, corridors or rooms of any Travelodge hotel.

When the rot set in

At last, an explanation as to why it takes so long to get things done and built in England.

It’s not just a recent phenomenon, we have been getting slower for centuries.

Take the example given on the Hadrians Wall bus today:

It took the Romans approximately eight years to build the 75 or so miles of Hadrians wall.

It took the Normans and their successors nearly 100 years to build the two miles of city walls in Newcastle.

At this rate it’s unlikely that modern Britons will get even a garden wall built before the end of the millennium

Minding the Manners in Manors

The Newcastle Metro is nearly 30 years old, so I wasn’t expecting the most high-tech of ticket buying experiences when I walked the short distance from my hotel to Manors station yesterday evening.

I was pretty certain that the machines wouldn’t take cards, after all my local station which is in the top 25% of most used stations in the country has only been accepting cards in the ticket machines for the last three years.

However, given that the cost of a day ticket is £3.90, and you can buy even more expensive tickets, I did kind of expect that the machine would take my five pound note.

I was proved to be very wrong. The only thing the machines take is coins, and at Manors station there are no change machines, no ticket offices, no staff.

I did feel like omitting an expletive, given that there are also no shops any where nearby to get change from.

Though if I had done I would probably have gotten in trouble as there was a very large poster next to the machine stating that the metro operator would not tolerate abuse or foul language in its stations.

Perhaps one cause of this might be forcing all their customers to carry around a couple of kilos of small change.