Many years ago a friend, John, and myself were nominated to go to the annual general meeting of our local MS Branch in London.
I was just starting with the symptoms of MS and was still able to walk a bit. John doesn't have MS, he was just one of our MS Branch helpers. As neither of us had ever been further than Chester before we were both delighted to be going to the 'Big City'.
When we arrived at Euston station our guy in charge hailed a taxi to take us to our hotel. But when we we arrived and tried to check-in, we were told that the hotel was full! The helpful receptionist phoned around and found us another hotel.
Both John and myself could barely wait to explore London, so we just dumped our bags at the hotel and off we went to explore. First of all we wanted to see the Houses of Parliament. Then we travelled what felt like 100 miles on buses and taxis to visit the 'Bloody Tower'. We kept dashing around seeing all these exciting places.
At 11pm I said that we had better go back to our hotel as we (me obviously in particular) were exhausted. I asked John the name of this other hotel that we had been booked into, but John said that he had no idea and hoped that I may have remembered. But I couldn't remember either! I thought that there was another hotel close to it which was all lit up with the name 'Endslea' or something like that.
We asked people walking about if any of them knew where this hotel was, but none of them had ever heard of any hotel by that name. Then we asked some policemen. None of them could help either and one suggested that we ask a taxi driver. So we stopped the first taxi we found and asked the driver if he knew where 'The Endslea' or something like that was. He was ever so helpful and fortunately found it for us.
It was now 12.30am and we were both completely exhausted. We flopped down on our beds and fell asleep.
We were woken by a knock on our door the following morning. It was two maids who wanted to tidy our room. As we were still in our clothes we pretended that we had got up and got dressed!
As the maids were busily tidying our room, John said 'and you will come and tuck us in tonight won't you?'. 'Yes sir, of course sir', they said laughing.
We thought no more about it and left for the AGM. That afternoon a guy from another branch, George, asked us if we would mind if he stayed in our room as the hotel that he was staying at was not very nice. Of course we didn't mind as there were 3 beds and although George was a bit older than us, we did know him quite well.
After the AGM both John and myself were determined that we were going to have an early night and we went to bed about 10pm.
A little bit later there was a knock on our door and I, thinking it was George, got up to let him in as he didn't have a key himself.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the door and those two maids walked in! After getting over the shock of seeing them I asked them what they wanted.
'You asked us to come, so here we are!', they said, giggling. We tried explaining to them that we were only joking, but no way would they go and they were obviously getting a bit fed up with our lack of enthusiasm!
Then there was another knock on our bedroom door. Splendid, we thought, it was George who would help us get the girls out. But when George walked in and saw the girls, he just said 'Oh! Sorry lads', and went back out again!
It took us quite some time to persuade the girls to leave.
And if George should be reading this, nothing happened!!
