I make a declarative statement.

I am in a bed and breakfast. (Not right at this moment, obviously, because I'm back, but I open with a present tense declarative statement because it makes a dramatic impact on the opening of the blog post.)

I find myself falling asleep wondering how many other people have slept in the bed before me. Even with a conservative estimate and a proprietor who engages in regular airing and fumigation you can easily get into triple figures.

I find myself wondering how much other genetic material mine is mingling with beneath me, like some mixer party for death. I look at time itself as a moment - how many people am I sleeping with in that moment? It's like putting a sheet and duvet over Catherine the Great. What if someone died in this bed and they called out CSI: East Midlands? They'd find the DNA of thousands, it'd be like a Serbian mass grave.

I have this difficulty everywhere I go that isn't my own. So a hotel changes the sheets between each guest, doesn't really make the place that clean. I remember staying in a place in Budapest on one of our family trips to Romania - the beds were all damp, we weren't sure whether that was due to mild cleaning or the unthinkable. I stayed at a B&B in Blackpool for NUS conference one year where I swear I got an eye infection off my pillow. I woke up the first morning thinking that breakfast smelled great, then I realised it was the bedding.