Fasting, sweating, kettling - but rare success means it was worth every minute

It didn’t start well. Rachael had said she’d hired a car and we would meet the shuttle bus across from the terminal. Twenty minutes of standing in the howling wind, in the wrong place, and then a mile long trek to the right place and we finally found said 'shuttle bus'.

At the office, they then explained some convoluted reason as to why the price was actually double what we had already paid. Amazingly, Covid, Brexit or Ukraine wasn’t mentioned as part of the reason. Eventually Rachael got her hands on the keys and drove us Verstappen-like to our hotel.

I had 4lb to lose so I skipped dinner and took the stairs up to floor nine, only to discover my room had no bath. I took the lift back down, grumbling. Assigned a new room, only seven flights of stairs this time, I quickly began running my bath, switching to cold water about three-quarters of the way up. Unfortunately, while this room did have a bath, it was one which didn’t have cold water. The next 40 minutes were spent filling a small kettle with cold water from the sink and pouring it into the boiling bath.