Sleeping with the Enemy

It was on the train from Birmingham New Street to the National Exhibition Centre that I sensed that all was not well. I was pressed into a corner by gaggles of painted fashionistas, immaculate in their manicured talons and extended hair-pieces.

I was on my way to give a 'travel talk' at the Eve Magazine show, unaware of what I was letting myself into. For next door to the hall where I was to speak was a much bigger hall, taken up with the Clothes Style Show. You could hear it from a distance, a shrill ululation of raised voices. As I got closer, along the grim corridors of the Exhibition Centre, my heart drooped. I was a Gulliver marooned on a strange island. The crowds of teenage girls grew denser, and my alienation grew deeper. No wonder, for it It turned out that 300 coach loads of girls had been decanted into the Show for an educational day out. The education was, presumably (and according to one girl I chatted to) in 'how to shop'. Perhaps the celebrity crowd-animators who seemed to do nothing but offer the expectant girls another freebie ("Now what do I have in this bag for you?") were funded by the Department of Education. It was an education for me, anyway.

I ended the day, in some desperation after a last-minute error over hotel-bookings, at the Hyatt Regency hotel, kidding myself that I was testing the opposition. I had a handsome bedroom and ate superbly, all this in a chain hotel that I couldn't possibly include in my books. So I have to end on a defensive/offensive note: our Special Places do even better and are less expensive. So there!