The joy of hotel rooms

It's 1.45am in Munich and I can't sleep. Hotel rooms can be depressing places at times.

Nevertheless, it has been a stimulating and varied day, in between performances of Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony with the Munich Philharmonic and Jun Maerkl yesterday, tomorrow and Sunday. I started learning Stravinsky's Concerto for PIano and Winds; met out of the blue Tim Busby, an old colleague of Jeannie from Singapore; received the 1st edit of my CD of Rachmaninov preludes which I am avoiding listening to (the first listen is often rather painful); and went to one of the most disappointing concerts of my life, the Herbie Hancock Sextet (the Gasteig acoustics are far too resonant for jazz, on top of which the playing was simply baffling and self-indulgent, to my ears at least. I didn't even make it to the end of the first half). On top of this, I just finished reading Sophie's World which I enjoyed greatly and was mildly disturbed by, for reasons I can't go into so as not to spoil it for those of you who haven't read it.

So what do you do with a surfeit of stimulation at 1.45 in a Munich hotel? Apart from write a blog post, that is. I have nothing else to read, I hate watching TV late at night, and there's no space to do Tai Chi in the room. I could look for creepy-crawlies in the bed (I had to move rooms because the first one had a minor infestation - that's a first for me) but that just breeds paranoia. I can get a bit phobic about insects. Soon after I met Jeannie we took a trip to Glen Coe and when we went to bed in the guest house I discovered there were a few midgies in the room. Well, those buggers can smell me from 500 metres so I spent the next 20 minutes squashing them against the walls. And Jeannie still married me! Enough rambling.