3Ness: Executive Style
3Ness weekends run from Friday midday to Sunday 2pm, which is very civilised as one can theoretically sleep in (ie anything past 6am) on Friday and be home on Sunday in time for pre-birthday cocktails at Westbourne House. But Friday had an discouraging start. A person investigating what it’s like to be a single chick at a 3Ness weekend, where my only duty would be to make friends and endure an extensive range of exercise, I first had a lesson on why Londoners don’t smile at, talk to or even look at, much less make friends with strangers.
It was on the tube. I largely commute by bike, so found the underground to be sweltering even by 9:30am. On top of this experience of hardship shared with my fellow travellers, my train was afflicted by a driver with less motor-skill control than I displayed the first time I attempted to drive, and that’s saying something. At any rate, I’m Australian. I look at strangers, I smile at them, and certainly talk to them, provided they don’t look too frightening. As our train bunny-hopped its way out of Lancaster Gate station, I shared all of the above with a dude wearing a BBC lanyard. You never know, he might have been a key player in the drama or writers departments.
Sods Law, he was not. He was tech support, and within about two stations, I realised he was more frightening – in that kind of slightly desperate, sweaty bachelor manner – than I had initially clocked. When he changed his route to match mine, I started to feel claustrophobic – crowded trains aside – and when he thought he’d get off at Euston to have a coffee with me before my train, I started to stammer in sheer terror. Lesson, ladies – don’t start up random conversations on public transport unless it’s with someone you’d actually like to have coffee with, just in case you otherwise have to start babbling about a fictional boyfriend who may be a boxer/vampire/high security prison inmate or dubious combination of all three.
The journey improved from that point – absolutely no-one wanted to talk to me on the train to Nuneaton after I’d performed an antisocial range of contorting stretches in the aisle, so I learned most of my new Body Pump release (to be launched on Monday, when I discovered that learning an hour of new choreo on 2 hours of travel was probably not one of my more brilliant ideas) – and then I was picked up by Paul, in his convertible. Top-down. I italicise the car because I don’t think I’ve ever been in one – I remember thinking the sun roof on a friend’s 4WD was the bomb – and I italicise Paul because he clearly had to have better things to do half an hour before the launch of his event than pick me up from the rail station. I expected a charming minion, but was myself charmed instead. There was an ulterior motive though, I am relieved to say, involving a rather desperate shopping trip into Hinckley, a town which had three travel agents but no lingerie store. Long story.
I soon bypassed charmed in favour of slightly worried when I discovered that I’d been given an executive single suite in Barceló Hinckley Island. To someone who tends to travel via the esteemed accommodations of YHA and YMCA, this was a Face Book status update-worthy thrill. The last time I’d been put up in a hotel, it was an allegedly 4 Star in Berlin for a Valkyrie press trip. That hotel may have had a 4 Star wing, but we journalists were certainly not in it. Here though I could lie both longways and lengthways across a bed which I was in absolutely no danger of falling out of. I had my own ensuite. As someone who lives in a student halls of residence, I cannot describe the joy of arranging my toiletries on the vanity. I was beginning to wonder whether I would be able to give Paul everything he wanted in return though. The magic typing fingers will have to Do Their Thing.
I promptly lost the room key the first time I ventured out to get lost in the hotel, but it didn’t matter because Barceló is posh enough to furnish me with a new key plus smile, and even take my Forbidden Planet bag with its rather revolting looking energy shakes into the staff fridge, with said smile still intact. I then lost that key on the Sunday when trying to check out. When I confessed, they were still smiling, though probably with relief, as they handed my back my bag of remaining brown gloop. That’s proper service and a fine start and close of a weekend escape.
Tomorrow: Got the moves, just not the groove…