The oddest place I’ve ever slept…

It was pipe like this – except without the bed, the door, the electric light…

Top five oddest places I’ve slept in, on or under…

1. In a pipe – at some construction site near Grenoble, France. (“Ce n’est pas un lit,” I thought to myself.) I woke and left before being hoisted up by a crane.
2. Under a wardrobe (and some mattresses) – after a big night in Dublin. Took a while to be discovered and then extricated.
3. At the edge of a cliff – by accident. It was dark. We had been trekking over some small mountains. We were tired. Luckily – so we didn’t walk any further forward. In the morning we discovered the tent was covered in snow. As was the land on either side. But not in front. That’s where the cliff was – and the sea.
4. By petrol pumps near Karlsruhe, Germany. That’s where my last lift dropped me. I’d hitched from Poland. There was grass and undergrowth which looked more soft and inviting, but was rustling with quare fellas.* So a nap amidst the hard surfaces, flourescent lighting and idling engines seemed preferable.
5. In the middle of a sentence while broadcasting live on the radio. One moment I was giving out some racing results, then next I was slurring… murmuring… silent. People checked the tuning on their radios. Then they heard snoring. How mortifying.**

Advertisement

When have you last walked out of a film?

Ah Holy God. No! Please no!

When has a film been so tedious, so unimaginative, so stultifyingly boring that you decided life was too short to continue watching? I tend to want to finish what I start, not rely solely on first impressions and give things a chance to breathe and settle. I’m tolerant. But this week I encountered a film that was beyond even my broad Pale.

I’m not complaining. I’ve been lucky lately. I’ve seen Up In The Air this week (beautifully shot, very calming, George Clooney plays a corporate downsizer), Sherlock Holmes (a radical new approach to the franchise which works – full of action, humour, Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law), Astroboy (cartoon hero with machine guns in his butt – the 10-year-old boys I was with liked it) and Caramel (a Lebanese film by Nadine Labaki with no subtitles in English, but full of sympathetic characters and a good trick with a telephone conversation).

But my good run has just come to an end. Drowned in Holy Water.