I keep forgetting where I am. A different American city every week makes it hard to remember where the light switch is on the bedside table. Is it up or down, do you push it or twiddle it or is it connected to a more complicated system that you have to get out of bed to operate? The ‘turn-down service’ also seems to be a turn-on service: that’s to say, you come home from the theatre to music, or ‘Mozak’, leaking into the room from an invisible source. Finding where it’s coming from reminds me of the old days, looking for the bug in Prague hotel rooms, but it’s not so much fun. Stopping the music, or calling for someone to stop it, usually takes about half an hour. I have given up telling housekeeping to stop putting those poisonous chocolates on my pillow. But they keep coming, so I hoard them and unobtrusively drop them back on the housekeeping trolley on my way to the lift when the maid isn’t looking.
The joy of performing nightly to ecstatic Seppo audiences (Australian rhyming slang: Septic tanks — Yanks) is punished by the daily search, increasingly desperate as the tour wears on, for food that tastes of something.
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