My ability to fall asleep at inopportune moments knows no bounds. Nightclubs, trains, hotels where construction work is taking place noisily outside, the flight path of the world’s largest airport – you name it, and I can probably fall asleep there. On Friday night, it was all I could do to struggle through 30 minutes of Punch Drunk Love before realising that I had spent a greater proportion of that time dozing than I had done awake, like some ageing narcoleptic, and crawled off to bed due to the fact that I probably wasn’t doing the film justice. Ah, such is the rock n’ roll lifestyle I lead these days.
Somehow, despite the early night, I spent most of Saturday feeling utterly exhausted. In fact, the only time over the weekend when my powers of sleep deserted me was Sunday night, which is rather disappointing and made Monday morning more than a little unpleasant, to say the least.
I spent Saturday afternoon at Kew Gardens with Sal. It’s the third time I’ve been there, but the first time it has been noticeably hotter outside the Palm house than inside. I was also surprised to discover that there’s a mini aquarium display thing underneath the Palm house showing various colourful tropical fish. It must have always been there and I’ve just never noticed it, but it did provide a diverting few minutes, as we watched a small fish chase one of the larger fish around while trying, unsuccessfully, to eat it.
On Sunday, Sal’s mum and her cousin returned from travelling in Europe, and after the not-being-around-when-their-initial-flight-arrived-due-to-Glastonbury debacle, we were sort of obliged to go and meet her off the coach and help with the bags. Now, I’d assumed that we’d be going somewhere logical, like Victoria coach station, or at least have arranged a meeting place that there’s only one of, but that would have been far too simple. Beforehand, though, we dropped in on Claire’s impromptu, “it’s a sunny day, let’s have a barbeque”, barbeque just down the road in Clapham south, for about 30 minutes, before we had to rush off (although we were there long enough to get the chance to see Claire’s excellent glasto photos, which included a classic picture of my head emerging, tortoise-like, blinking, through the tent flap one morning). Once it crept towards 3, we had to head over to Kensington, on the basis of what I now realise were the flimsiest of details: a text message indicating that their tour would drop them at the Hilton on “Holland Park Road”.
I now know rather more about the location of Hilton hotels in west London than I really need to, but the invaluable snippet of information that I will take from yesterday is that there are two Hilton hotels on either side of Holland Park. One is close to, but not on, the suspiciously small and residential Holland Park Road that we headed to; the other one is on Holland Park Avenue, over the other side of the park. I’m sure you can work out what happened for yourself, as events unfolded with a crushing inevitability not unlike they would in some shabby BBC sitcom. We met them in the end of course, some time later, (despite almost missing them again at our second meeting place, High Street Ken tube, after persuading them to get on the tube by themselves…).