Saturday morning and I'm just packing my bags for Manchester and the Britannia Hotel. For a balanced set of reviews of this behomoth, look at TripAdvisor. Looks like an absolute piece of crap, with staff like badly programmed AI units. I'm sure I'll enjoy it.
Looking back over my Hunter S Thompson back catalogue, I'm wondering how it'll stack up against the Sheraton-Schroeder Hotel in Milwaukee where Thompson stayed during the 1972 Presidential Campaign (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Chapter 'April'). I quote:
Eight months in the Sheraton-Schroeder is like three months in the Cook County jail. The place is run by old Germans.... they are doing everything possible to make sure that nobody unfortunate to be trapped here this week will ever forget the experience. The room radiators are uncontrollable, the tubs won't drain, the elevators go haywire every night, the phones ring for no reason at all hours of the night, the coffee shop is almost never open, and about 3 days before the election the bar ran out of beer... Dick Tuck, the legendary Kennedy advance man now working for McGovern, has stayed here several times in the past and calls it 'the worst hotel in the world'.
I think 4 nights in the Britannia will test that appellation to its limits... apparently there is wireless broadband in the hotel (which sounds almost unbelievable given the lack of investment in basic items like sheets, furniture and cleaning staff) and I have cadged a laptop somehow, so should be able to broadcast from within this monstrosity. It'll give me something to do whilst trying watching mock-Stalinist show-piece speeches from Labour ministers through a field of snow on an aerial-less TV. Still, it is Manchester, so there are several CAMRA pubs within walking distance of the hotel, and the curry mile... so I should survive. L8ers!
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