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Went to Luton, which is the sort of thing I like.
You know the magnetic swipe cards that modern hotels have instead of room keys? You’re supposed to keep them away from mobile phones, lest the electromagnetic radiation affect the magnetic stripe, which is bollocks, but still they invariably stop working after precisely the second night. I only had one night in Luton, but getting into the hotel room was a challenge, even after the excellent staff replaced my card twice – I think something was (and remains) wrong with the lock. Woe is me.
And the combined bath/shower was a bit poor (water kept trickling out of the taps, no matter how hard I yanked the knob to engage shower mode), and the air conditioning wouldn’t be silenced, and I took against the ergonomics of the stylish plastic chair and the TV remote control. And the breakfast was strange – while perusing the buffet, I was presented with a big plate of egg and bacon and sausage, which was fine but a bit presumptuous (how could they tell I would eat those things?). (And I usually enjoy a badly scrambled egg, but there was something quite wrong about this one.)
“I’m never staying at an Ibis again,” I found myself thinking, which is possibly a seven-word short story or a reusable New Yorker Caption Contest cartoon caption. But actually I’m curious to see how other Ibides compare – I’m sure I’ve been to a better one before, and what about the “Ibis Budget”?
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I’m not Christine Teigen’s mother (who’s she?), but I’ve owned more than one pair of AirPods. I console myself that they’ve been out for a few years now, and I would probably have broken more wired earphones in that time, but it’s an icky situation, and one can’t simply throw them in the bin because batteries etc. Well, at last I went and took the busted AirPods to CeX, which is less remunerative than eBay might be but also less hassle. Cool story.