Having sold our house, getting rid of stuff before the removalists arrived, and moving out, we are now ‘of no fixed address’. To take advantage of the situation, we have been on a road trip in northern New South Wales for a couple of weeks and a couple of thousand kilometres (with another week to go), visiting friends, relatives and colleagues, and have had only intermittent access to the internet. As a consequence, with all that palaver, as well as all the driving, I have written almost nothing in the last month. However, now I am getting back into it.
Staying in motels and serviced apartments (take-aways and restaurant food starts to pall after a while), you notice the odd irritation in both forms of accommodation. One which is positively dangerous for someone like me, who has had a hip replacement, is slippery shower recesses. This slipperiness is when either the shower is over the bath, or over floor tiles which are exceptionally slippery when covered in soapy water. We have found that the best way to counter this is to put one of the provided hand-towels in the bath or on the tiles1, to stand on (the foot towel is for when you hope out of the bath/shower recess). You still need to be careful, but it cuts down the likelihood of going base over apex. When we had our bathroom updated some years ago (in our now former house), we covered the floor in non-slip tiles, and they have proved to be exceptionally good at being non-slip even when covered in soapy water. Why motels and serviced apartments cannot manage this, is difficult to understand. Do they just go for the cheapest option, and bugger the consequences? I wonder if a few doses of litigation would have any effect2,3.
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