I stayed in a dodgy hotel.

So anyway, London. I stayed in this fleapit hotel in Crystal Palace. It was as good as you could expect for £34 a night, which is 74p everywhere else in the country. I only got up late enough for breakfast on one of my four sleeps there – cloying white bread through the industrial toaster, apple juice out of a vat and chewy rice crispies. My usual B&B wasn’t available.

The lobby was beautiful, all graceful marble and nicely-lit coving. It seems the budget ran out at this point, for they only had £130 to do the hundred-odd bedrooms. The smell on the first floor took me a couple of days to place – I realised that pernicious whiff was my car when I bought it. All damp and melancholy – it had been owned by an old man and then kept in storage for seven months.

The decor in my room could only be described as care home chic, all textured wallpaper with a protective covering of magnolia and grime. Adjoining rooms had at some point been separated by filling the door frame with papier mache, I could hear everything going on next door. The first night wasn’t too bad, aside from the 13-minute (I timed it) discussion between the two northerners dwelling therein as to whether their shower had a curtain or not.

The second night I managed to watch an entire episode of CSI: Miami without ever switching the television on and they stayed up until three in the morning watching one of those horrifically inane win-the-universe-by-answering-this-stupidly-easy-question-calls-cost-£8-from-a-BT-landline phone-in quiz programmes that make me want to die. I had to be up at 5am, I wanted them to die.