An Alarming Night In Glasgow
I was sitting in my Daffy Duck pyjamas, thinking how lucky I was to have found one of the last available hotel rooms in Glasgow, when the fire alarm went off. Thirty seconds later I was out on the street wearing my shoes on the wrong feet. I had jumped into them just moments after jumping out of my own skin.
It had been a last minute decision to stay in the city tonight but it had taken me almost two hours to find somewhere to sleep. Apparently there's some big medical convention in town and every hotel is full of people in white coats wearing stethoscopes. My fall-back position in such circumstances is to turn up at my Dad's house and beg a bed there. The thing is, I worry about regressing to my childhood or teenage years. I'll be offered soup and get a ticking off for staying out after nine o'clock. In the morning I'll wake in a panic because I've forgotten to do my homework.
This gave me the incentive to keep phone-bashing, and eventually I got myself a room at the on West Nile Street. It's one of those places where you need a magnetic key card to make the lift work. I discovered that after repeatedly stabbing the button for the second floor but emerging back at the ground floor reception desk time and time again.
Still it was good to get to the bedroom, kick off my shoes and curl up in bed with all the paperwork for my meeting at Pacific Quay tomorrow. And that's when the alarm sounded. A false alarm, as it turned out. The firemen came, they saw, they talked to the manager and they let us back into our rooms.
It gave us all a fright when someone shouted "duck!" but that's what happens when you wear novelty jim-jams.
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