It puts the lotion in the basket

Gruntings. Your Correspondent was in the Suttee of Sails this week, partly because Work told him to be, partly because it was free, which is everyone's favourite price. I would emphasize though that it was NOT a junket. It was a training trip. This is a junket.


All those offended by the low-rent quality of that last joke are welcome to retain their receipts for a full refund on what they paid for this farrago of nonsense and arse.

Anyway, free shit. It's tops. Even when it's shit. Like the free shit to be had in your average big city, corporate-traveller-spec hotel suite. And free shit you must have, because you are on a junket. Not on a junk, because that's one of those boats they have in Hong Kong. Or a 1974 Leyland P76. Or the stuff Keef Richards stuck in his arm, leg and arse for ten years. Or the contents of Anthony Weiner's tighty-whiteys. (Which raises the question, with that precedent, can we now have Tony Abbott booted-out and fucked-off for exposing everyone in Australasia against their will to images of his sausage-and-beans?)

Free shit in hotels is, I will accept, usually pretty grim. In many places, with the onset of tight-arsed management reigning in freebies, the only free shit to be had is here.


However, the powers-that-be have thought it through; if it all becomes too hard to deal with, you can phone a friend. Which is probably more palatable an option than working it out with a pencil.

The etiquette of answering a call whilst answering a call isn't the only issue which faces the corporate hotel guest, of course. There's the question of how much it's appropriate to nick. How much free shit is legit, and how much makes you look like a preselection candidate for the next series of Hoarders? As you may expect, my advice is more is always better, and more than that is even always betterer. Take it all, baby. The coffees, the teas, the nasty powdered hot chocolate shite that looks and tastes like freeze-dried arse, the sugars, even the box they come in if it isn't specifically prohibited, or listed on the mini-bar checklist. The UHT milks, because you never know when you might need to poison @beeso. The crappy little three-sheet notepad and the pen that will last about as long as it takes you to forget which identikit beige palace you nicked it from in the first place. Nick these things. It is your duty as a servant of the firm who pay your wages. It's factored into the room tariff, so if you don't, it's like those hotel chain bastards are getting something for FREE. How the very fuck dare they, I would submit.

The bathroom, of course, is a verdant green paddock of potential free-shit-theftage. Complimentary toiletries? If one must... However, things have advanced a long way since the days when all you got was a paper-wrapped roundel of Lux toilet soap. Hotel toiletries have gone all sophistimacated. Headcount from Auckland: oblong cubes of artisan soap, individually boxed, two units thereof. Shower cap, possibly unused. 'Vanity kit', consisting of three cotton buds in a small cardboard box. I stuck one in each nostril and still didn't look like Prince's ex. It's possible I was doing it wrong, but I reserve the right to sue.


And then the Stuff In Bottles. So much Stuff In Bottles. Teeny-tiny squared-off bottle-ettes of potions and unguents. With just the tiniest bit of mission creep seeping into proceedings. One for shampoo, one for conditioner - yeah, fair enough. One for 'hand and body wash' - OK, but is that not redundant with the two (count 'em) blocks of soap already in the stocktake? And then, most bizarre of all, the 'hand and body lotion.'

Let's stop right there. I would be prepared to lay down cold hard earned cash, in the form of this 10 Euro note I found in a drawer while moving, which will shortly be on parity with a $10 note from an old Monopoly set, that none of the bottles of 'hand and body lotion' (or similar) found in any corporately-minded hotel suite - for there is at least one in every single fucking one of them - has been opened and used for any purpose at all, at any time. Other, I hesitate to suggest, than in the pursuit of executive relief. It's like the fucking Gideon's Bible, except for wankers. Insert joke here that will get me in trouble with the Godbotherers. Pause for editing.

More alarmingly - mostly for Godbotherers - I checked every bedside drawer, cupboard and storage nook - even the minibar fridge - and the particular hotel suite I was inhabiting this week had no Gideon's Bible to be found. Not a fucking sausage. Or a Gideon's Bible either. May have been the odd sighting of a 'fucking sausage' on the soft-porn pay-per-view but I wasn't that keen to check. Now this, I expect, leaves the religiously minded traveller in a quandary. How is it possible for heathen onanists to repent their self-abusive sins of the flesh without the once-ubiquitous word of God close to hand? (After wiping said hand on the curtains, presumably.) These filthy, disgusting hotel chain PERVERTS are enabling, nay ENCOURAGING, godless corporate hand-shandyists to interfere with themselves without any means of finding repentant salvation immediately thereafter, by making it no longer possible to bible-bash after bashing the bishop.

Still, as one might expect, science has the last laugh. The ingredients of aforesaid 'hand and body lotion' lists a range of slightly alarming constituents...

...which the more rational or reserved traveller may consider best kept a respectable distance from his reproductive componentry. In particular, one may note the most prevalent ingredient after water: mineral oil.

Well, look on the bright side. You'll go blind, but at least it won't rust off.

The Doctor is OUT.