Italians, an Operatic Sea Mammal and Ice Cream.
Arriving for my duty early in the morning at the London hotel where I was employed, I called the Night Manager to see where he was so we could meet and he could do his handover. “Meet me in the lobby bar, I’m here with Night Security”. This was a bit strange as we normally handed over in the office, but still, to the lobby bar I went.
We had a football team staying with us, finalist for the FA Cup which had been played the day before. If memory serves me right, they lost, but had a mega-party to drown their sorrows, and sprawled out in the bar from the effects of too much alcohol was their driver, Mr Graison. The first thing that came to mind when I saw him was Mr Creosote from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. He was big. He was also comatose.
Both the Night Manager and Night Security were trying to revive him, for Mr Graison was laid out on a sofa in the middle of the lobby with other guests passing by to go to the breakfast room. His snoring and chin dribble were not the best things to encounter first thing in the morning, neither were the glimpses of his belly fat through the unbuttoned parts of his shirt.
“See, he’s not moving”, said the Night Manager, shaking the beached whale. “We’ve been trying to wake him for 20 minutes”.
