At last… a decent view from my bedroom window.
This week I am staying in a Premier Inn on “The English Riviera”. Torquay, to be precise.
The hotel has two parts – an old part and a new part. I have been placed on the top floor of the old part, which has bags of character. The first bit of character I noticed was that the lift doesn’t work. Fortunately, there are only a couple of floors to go up and I am still young enough and fit enough to bound up them with ease (only one bit of this sentence is true).
Another characteristic is that my room is e-bloody-normous – at least the size of two normal rooms. And from my bedroom window I have a lovely view of some tended gardens and the seafront. I can see the sea!
It’s also a very quiet hotel, with the majority of the guests being retired couples and old people in their seventies and eighties. Some look like they may have actually come here to die.
Being a Tuesday night, I went to the cinema earlier. No huge multiplexes here though. The nearest cinema was a 15 minute walk away, in a residential street. I walked into the foyer to find it was deserted save for the young girl in the ticket kiosk. “Hello”, she smiled brightly at me. The badge pinned to her ample bosom proclaimed her name to be Mel and that she was here to help.
“Hello”, I said. “I’ve come to see Mel Gibson”.
“Ahh yes, he’s in screen 4. He won’t be ready for another ten minutes yet. Still putting his makeup on”, she joked. “Take a seat and I’ll call you” she said, as she took my money. I smiled at her sense of humour.
I sat on a hard plastic chair for a few minutes whilst I waited and still no-one came in. “Mr Gibson will see you now”, Mel called out to me over the carefully stacked bags of popcorn.
I followed the signs for screen 4 and found myself heading down several flights of stairs, going off in various directions. Like my hotel, this cinema had some character and olde worlde charm to it.
I opened the door to screen 4 to find myself in one of the smallest cinemas I have ever been in. Possibly the smallest. I was so amazed at it’s smallness that I stood right at the back and took a rather grainy photo using my phone camera. I could do this without embarrassment as I was the only one there. No-one else turned up. At all.
It was a bit like sitting at home alone, watching telly.
Except it reeked faintly of piss.
But it was good to see Mel Gibson back to his old self.












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