How To Have Fun Without Any Clothes On

You know when you are in a hotel room, you can see the crack of light under the bathroom door? Always useful for finding it in the dark, especially when you are in a different hotel every night, as is often the case for me these days. I was on tour with Katie Melua, and we were in York. I got up for a wee in the middle of the night, and, using the light under the door as my guiding star, I wandered, half asleep and completely naked, towards the bathroom. Eyes half closed, not very alert, - I opened the door and stepped into the bathroom. Except it wasn’t the bathroom. It was the corridor of the hotel.

Just as I heard the sickeningly final clunk of the door closing behind me I realised the awful truth. I was standing, completely naked, with no key, in the brightly lit corridor of this medium-to-posh country hotel. My door was firmly locked behind me. There was not even so much as a magazine or room service napkin lying around to offer me any “cover”.

Luckily, at 4am I was the sole occupant of the corridor. It didn’t take me long to realise that I had only one option. To go down to the hotel reception and see if there was a night porter to let me back into my room. There was. He was sitting at the desk reading a newspaper. I decided that being shy would be more embarrassing than pretending this sort of thing happened quite often, so I just strode up to the desk as nonchalantly as possible, leaned a casual arm on the check-in desk and told the guy I’d accidentally locked myself out of my room. I didn’t need to mention that I was totally, stitchlessly, bollock-naked.

To his great credit he just got up, all stiff upper lip and sang-froid, took the master keys, said “This way, Sir” and led me back up the stairs to my first floor room, let me in and wished me goodnight.

Just thought I’d pass it on. Don’t ever trust that crack of light