Hotel Corridors

High Wycombe, home for a year or so, just while I got my training contract completed at any rate. I hadn’t been able to find one in London, a training contract that is, and after a great deal of bar work and applications, things had gone tits up with my girlfriend of the time, who happened to be the nanny for the wealthy family providing the tidy little St John’s Wood apartment roof over our heads. The classic London pub I’d been working in, just around the corner, The Jolly Crocker, also closed its doors at about the same time, sold to a Thai restaurateur. Fortunately, I managed to get a few days squatting on her upper floors by the grace of the Maori girl who’d been running her, just while I got my shit together. So, I ended up in High Wycombe, my London days had lasted all of six months, it’d been a taste, but I wanted a bigger bite, and I absolutely took one. My job meant that I spent a lot of time between the Royal Courts of Justice and the gypsy sites of Buckinghamshire, these were planning application appeal cases, and we were at the forefront, well, at least my boss Jeremy Brown was, amazing man, blind too, but it didn’t stop him getting to Lord’s on the tube with only a stick, he loved to listen to the cricket, played it too, using a ball with a bell. The firm I worked for was in Chesham, right at the end of the Metropolitan line - so London in my book. It meant I got to sample the capital’s rat race and post work drinking culture first hand, if only a few days a week. I wrote out a list of things I still wanted to see, do and experience in London, I think I always knew deep down I was only passing through. It was only 45 minutes on the train from High Wycombe to London Euston, so I boxed off quite a lot at the weekends, although not quite as many as I needed to. My housemates were great, collectively we met quite a lot of people in High Wycombe, socially it was busy. My lucky break away came when I lost my driving licence following a young solicitor’s dinner in Rickmansworth, or some such place. It was on the Metropolitan line in any event, so I’d left my car in Chesham and taken the tube. The do was awful, so much so, I drank seven pints of Stella early in the evening and left. I got back to Chesham and slept in my car for a while, not long enough it seemed. The result was that I had to move to Chesham so I could walk to work, and therein lay some more stories for another time. From then on I was in London every weekend, mostly on my own. I couldn’t afford to stay over in London, my earnings were everything I deserved at the time, pretty poor, my fine was costing me too, and London isn’t cheap. I used to stay out all day exploring, visiting attractions, exhibitions and galleries, then party at night, often until after my last tube home. When I did get stranded with a skin full, I came up with an ingenious if rather cheeky way of staying off the streets for the night. I’d find myself a nice hotel with revolving or automatic doors that remained unlocked, then sweep in with my head up, confident and purposeful, as if I owned the place, straight to the lift and up, all the way to the top floor. Empty plates and fresh newspapers were a good sign, then on to an alcove or corridor off the main routes, curl up on often quite thick carpet, and sleep. Only once did I not wake up on my own accord and exit the hotel as if butter wouldn’t melt. Instead, I was shaken by my shoulder; it was the hotel duty manger, he asked if I was okay. I told him my name was Grant and that I had rowed with my girlfriend and left without my phone or key, forgetting my room number. Not bad for a young man woken abruptly with a hangover, but such are the powers of fear following shock to stoke up assertiveness. He escorted me downstairs to reception so that he could find my room number on the computer and set me up with a new key. Whilst he was engrossed in firing up the system, I simply walked out of the door and into the fresh morning sunshine in search of some breakfast, feeling better all the time; after all, I’d slept like a baby. Remarkably, considering everything that happened in that year, a lot of which I write about, I actually managed to qualify as a solicitor. But more importantly, I ticked everything off my list, and that was the source of everything that happened, experience is everything.