pumpkinstrokemarrow

For some reason last night I was on a business trip to Turkey. Not clear who I was working for or what I was doing there.

So I arrive in some large town, not Istanbul or Ankara, where I have been booked into a hotel for the first night; the idea being that after that you should be able to fend for yourself. I have a rather spare, but large and clean room. For some reason I abandon it and by the time I realise that perhaps I should have kept the room, I am too intimidated by the rather harassed young manageress to try and get it back.

I manage to find another hotel which has a room but for some other reason I don't take it. Perhaps it seemed too expensive.

Abandoning ship, decide to make tracks towards the place I am due at in the morning and so catch a train to Zig-Zog, a place on the south east coast, perhaps somewhere near Fethiya. The carriage consists of a number of compartments, without corridor and with each compartment perhaps 10 feet square with a bench down one side. My compartment has just one chap in it, sitting on one end of the bench. I sit down at the other and all is well until we reach the next stop when another half dozen people get into the compartment, rather more than the bench can take. I get squeezed at my end of the bench by a couple of bony nuns and the chap at the other end winds up stretched out on the floor.

Eventually we arrive at Zig-Zog and I find myself in the concourse area of the railway station. Usual sort of thing, if a touch foreign. I buy myself what looks like an AZ with which to find a hotel - not that AZs are actually any help in that department - only to find the thing completely unintelligible, appearing to consist of pictures aerial and otherwise, rather than of maps of the town.

Push on out of the station and it all looks a bit strange. A few big old buildings, churches and such like, to be seen. Lots of middle sized, modern blocks. A bit Parisian. Someone gives me some general directions and I head off up what turns into a narrow, high walled alley. Some clambering over steps and rocks needed. I pass a very English looking parson who is sermonising so I give him a wide berth - but somehow I know that I will get to know him well, much later on.

Break out into the open again and find another very English looking person, this one in a business suit, who is able to give me directions to the only area in town with hotels - while explaining that despite being a seaside resort, Zig-Zog is very badly equipped with them. He also explains that the trick with the AZ is to look through the windows in the pictures of buildings onto the maps behind. The trick seems to work.

Dive into another alley and come up underneath the veranda of a seafront, seafood restaurant, populated by sweaty locals. No holiday makers in sight at all. But the waiter gives me some more directions and eventually I find myself outside a hotel of rather far eastern appearance catering for English and German tourists. Clamber up the rather grand stairs - Duke of York steps sort of thing - to get into the very busy reception area. Rather old fashioned. Get told by a reception clerk - a plain, thin, middle aged and dowdily dressed lady - that the place is most certainly full. It has been raining and I am starting to look a bit dishevelled: she seems rather amused at my predicament. A bit malevolent in her amusement, to boot. Unkind.

Starting to panic a bit at this point. 2200, starting to get dark and nowhere to sleep. Weather not too clever. Shall I try and sleep in a restaurant? In some suburban doorway?

Somewhere along the way I meet someone who is into Polaris submarines (SSBNs) but who is not allowed to tell me about what he is doing in Turkey as it is secret.

Interesting that as I was waking up, I was able to get back into the edges of the dream, but not back into the dream proper. So I was getting related images but they were disconnected. Not part of the flow.

And them I got to thinking about how one would fare if dumped in London needing a hotel. When I was young, hotels meant flop houses in Kings Cross, floppish houses in Victoria and rather more expensive places in Bloomsbury and Bayswater. I used to use a rather odd place in Palace Court which doesn't seem to be there any more - although I don't seem to be able to get Streetview to work to check. Has it been turned off?

Apart from that you were a bit stuck and could wander around for a long time without finding anything that one could afford. Which is still true in some parts of London, particularly once you are out of the centre, but things are getting better. Plenty of hotels on the western outskirts of the city, some of them is disused insurance factories. For example the 'Mad Hatter' in Stamford Street. Not an old insurance factory as it happens, but I don't think it has been a hotel for very long. And there is a reasonable sprinkling of chain hotels - Premier Inn sort of places - in the suburbs. We even have a couple near us.

PS: glancing through the post, I see that there are rather too many rathers. Ought to thin them out a bit really but can't now be bothered.