Doesn't inspiration come at the damndest of times? Sitting on the toilet is my mind's personal favourite trick to play, also any time out on a quiet walk somewhere where you don't have pen or paper, and even if you did there's just no way you could get all those elusive little thoughts and phrases down in writing before most of them slipped away, little silvery fish of creativity that they are.
The other and, most annoying, time and place for these lost moments of thought in time is while travelling in a busy city, or better yet, on a bus. This has been happening to me a lot recently, I need a dictaphone and I'll just have to get over the fact I hate the sound of my voice.
The least marvellous part of it all is that you'll look a little insane with one of these things, talking apparently to yourself on a major roadway, public park or pavement, and the problem of the matter is that half the things I think of are less than pleasant about the people around me.
Not that I think badly of them more than anyone else thinks any worse of any other human beings, but my observations always come from all angles, being the fair and just fellow that I usually am, and the nice facets of a stranger's air and outward appearance are so much easier to think of after the fact, whereas watching the fat arse of some over-zealous pie-eater blocking pavement traffic is a lot easier to note as it happens, and thoughts of kindness, justification for their fat arses and wellwsishing for the success of their next diet are so often better crafted a little later, once you have finished your outraged circumnavigation of their gigantic behind and onto the pathway ahead. It is also usually arranged in your mind a little more entertainingly at the time too, as a rule.
Today, though, I don't have a problem with this 
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I have a strange and slightly silly story to tell. It centres around hotels, as some places have the outright audacity to call themselves, more often than not whereas words like `borstal`, `correctional facility`, and `penitentiary` line up in your mind far more readily once you have braved the check-in process.
I stayed at one in Madikeri, a place where I can share the details of quite soon. The room was cheap, I wasn't expecting much, and for only 200 Rupees a night I didn't get it. I was surprised and impressed that the cell walls actually included something a bit like an en-suite bathroom, although they also included an open drain and a window that was incapable of being shut, so on the first night back from the trek I presume one of these basic breaches of healthful security was how the cockroach got in.
It was about the size of a small hatchback family car, with feelers further extending out from the front of the beast that were far larger than a Nissan Micra's windscreen wipers could ever hope to amount to. They could doubtless clean the windscreen of my Mum's old Micra a shitload better than the factory issue ones ever could, that's for sure.
I don't really mind insects, not even cockroaches large enough to eat a whole human torso in one bite, but with a huge gap under the door to the `en suite` I felt something had to be done, so, with great regret, much remorse, and a neckerchief to protect my precious respiratory organs I sprayed it for a full half-minute with a concoction made of 50% DEET; the other half possibly being a mix of Agent Orange and cyanide.
After about 5 minutes of poor, awful, and guilt-inducingly pained wriggling the wretched thing upended itself in the classic "I've had enough now fetch the fucking priest please" posture and, with a little help from a shovel and a kindly local crane operator I managed to cram it back out of the window, where it fell two floors and killed three people and a passing cow.
Such is life - T.I.I.!!
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On a more serious and totally truthful note, I had to abseil out of my hotel in Cannanore this morning. I hyave since left and found myself a proper place to spend m,y money in, but this place was worth it for the experience alone...
The owners were, unfortunately probably still are somewhat lax when it comes to basic hotel management - I'm getting a pretty good feel for these things by now and this place will probably be shut down by the government health and mental care departments pretty soon.
The price for a room at 300 Rupees for a backstreet motel with darkened, flickering corridors lit on aggregate only 50% of the time thanks to exceedingly bad wiring and some very cheap flourescent lightbulbs, was not exactly inspiring, or encouraging.
The place is patrolled both by smirking, mustachioed grease-magnets of receptionists/clerks who probably think they represent the very peak of international hospitality, and also by murky, suspiciously lurking and only half-glimpsed janitors swathed in clothing usually only seen inside mental institutions, or maybe just very briefly right outside of the walls before they develop a patchy shades of crimson. 
Anyway, these proper Charlies lock the gates at night - all the gates - and with a bed you could break rocks on (someone had already experimented with this by the feel of it), a TV with no English channels, and excessively obtrusive noise from the wailing fellow inmates and the snoring staff sleeping on the floor right outside my door, I just had to get out.
Trouble was it was 3:30AM and the asylum probably didn't open for new inmates until about 10, so, patrolling about the place I found that the `hotel` itself was actually just one of many, many small businesss forming part of one of the little malls you see dotted everywhere in Indian cities - basically a lower parade of little shutter-fronted shops, a walkway mirroring the pavements one floor above and then another parade of shuttered shops again mirroring the establishments below.
Thankfully they had included railings in the design of this upper section, lest anyone ever realise the dreadfulness of the places there and decide to end it hop off and all, so, knowing that there was a 24-hour tea and coffee shop in a posh hotel a few blocks away, and with a desperate and desperately English yearning for a few hundred cups of tea, I found a window that was `forceable` (I only had to kick it a bit) and climbed out, onto the little legde between shopfronts, and managed to edge along and grab the railings, getting onto the upper walkway.
Bear in mind here please that a) it was about 4am by this point and no-one could see me, but I couldn't see very much either, and b) I really fucking wanted some fucking tea, so this didn't actually require much deliberation. I saw my goal and just went for it.
The cunning part was the Parachute cord I have been carrying around since November - thought I was daft did you, eh? - well I just looped it around the lower railings, gave myself a double-thickness line down to the ground, stripped off my shirt to wrap about my right hand and, with a single loop around the shirt tyo slow my descent slid myself straight down two storeys and onto the ground, landing only slightly heavily but with a pretty well controlled descent. Not even a friction burn from the cord either, but when I wandered into the coffee place at half past four in the morning my shirt looked like I'd wiped my arse with it.
Still, you can't have everything. I redeemed myself by checking into the far more luxuriant and expensive hotel next door and now enjoy telephone room service, laundry by telephonic demand, and staff who had never been subjected to suspicious medical experiments back in the 1950s.
Some of them even have ridiculous hats; I feel right back at home again 
