you know it’s the beginning of summer when your boat is brought to the yacht club for the lift in.

summertime!

summertime!

sailing season!

Hotels are lovely places when there is no one staying in the room either side of you. They are not nice places when you get woken up at 0100hrs by rowdy men and women, congregated in a room, smoking, shouting, drinking (presumably) and generally making as much noise as they can.

Rather than knock on the door to ask them to be quiet and risk assault for being a spoil sport, you ring the desk. They say they will go and ask them to be quiet. Twenty minutes later, they are still making just as much noise. You ring the desk again. They say that they spoke to them, but they will try again. Fifteen minutes later you ring again. Still no reduction in the noise coming from the room next door. Doors slam and people come and go from the room, but still no one seems to be acting in a manner that shows any consideration for people sleeping on the hotel floor. Another ten minutes and a fourth phone call to the desk. Followed by getting dressed and going down to ask them to go up again on the hour mark. The hour since you were woken up. The trouble is, the reception desk is deserted.

Defeated, you go back to your room and resolve to speak to the desk again in the morning. Mercifully, the rodwy crowd do seem to have dispersed slightly. At half two you can see that it is now two thirty in the morning but things have quietened down and you drift off to sleep.

All the while breathing in the cigarette smoke that has drifted into your room, in this, the smoke free hotel, all bedroom doors of which have a "no smoking" indicator affixed to them.

In the morning the staff are very sympathetic. Rowdy golf crowd. We did try to quieten them down. They were smoking? We will fine them fifty pounds for that.

Fifty pounds doesn’t give you back a disturbed nights sleep. As for the efforts to quieten them down, well, that would have involved going up to the room and informing them that they were making too much noise and waiting while they dispersed back to their own bedrooms.  Asking them to disperse/be quiet and then not waiting to see that they have actually dispersed, quietened down is not much use.

Hotel television in the UK consists of BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News, Channel 5? I think there is channel 5. As a child, terrestrial UK television was very exotic. I remember when multi channel arrived on the scene. We pleaded with our parents for the extra channels. They refused. Later we spent a while living abroad and in that time my parents rented their house. The tenants had multi channel turned on. So when we moved back into the house, it was still there. Oh, the excitment. BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, S4C, later came Sky News, Sky Sports, Sky One, MTV, the Discovery Channel etc. All so exotic. My latter days in primary school and my early days in secondary school were spent discussing the previous nights episode of neighbours and what Scott and Charlene were up to. I just would not have fitted in had I not been able to discuss Charlene’s hair and singing.

I find in ironic therefore that I am pining for RTE1 , RTE3, TV3 and Channel 6. It occurs to me that I actually watch programmes on those channels and I miss them! Thank heaven for Channel 4 . Without that, I’d have not a single channel to regularly watch BBC and ITV are full of crappy soaps like DeadEnders and Coronation Street and Emmerdale. The BBC does have Holby City which I like and I must also confess that being stuck in a hotel room has driven me to watching Hotel Bablyon. Purely for research purposes. I live in a hotel four or five nights a week. Irish terrestrial channels how I miss ye.

It does make me wonder why the Irish channels are not imported into the UK. They are not that bad.