Robert McNeil: Hotels I have known that have not been accommodating

Even though hotels are not all they’re cracked up to be, I was surprised that Ms Sturgeon’s political opponents didn’t demand that she stay in an Airbnb, or perhaps one of the new deluxe hostels that have replaced the Spartan premises of old.

One used to read of posh people who stayed in hotels all year round, though I can’t think this happens much now.

Imagine that: a room not of one’s own. It’s a long time since I stayed in a hotel but, as I recall, the experience was usually awful.

When I was a proper journalist, I used to get dispatched hither and yon every week to write “colour pieces” (basically, news stories but with more adjectives), so I got to know hotels well.

The Europa Hotel, in Belfast, must have thought us a peculiar bunch because we always removed the headboards on our beds, just as we thought the hotel peculiar for having its beds fixed to the floor (perhaps because of all the explosions).

Reason we removed the headboards: the phone connection was behind them and we needed to plug in our laptops back in these pre-wireless days.

Once, at a hotel in Aberdeen, I phoned down for an iron and a genuinely baffled voice said: “An iron? I’ve never heard such a request.”

Me: “I see. In that case, do you have a brain?” Him: “Brain? I’ve never heard of such a thing.” True story, apart from the last line.

Also in Aberdeen, I was woken early in the morning by repairs taking place to the room upstairs. Always the same in hotels: last places you would go for peace and quiet.

Noisy lifts, slamming doors, tellies blaring through thin walls, peculiar central heating and air conditioning systems that burbled and groaned all day and night.

The worst place I stayed in was on Orkney, not just because of the surly service, but also because the room was directly above the bar.

It was the same on Gigha, where the barman asked a table of late-night drinkers to keep the noise down as it might be disturbing the man upstairs.

“I am the man upstairs,” I said. “I thought I might as well come down and join the hulaballoo.”

And, oh, the cost of some of these places, particularly in the cities. Even in the days when newspapers were flush with money, I used to wonder why they put us up in such plush accommodation.

Once, after a night in a five-star joint on the Cardiff waterfront, I was summoned to the editor’s office, where I assumed he was going to give me another embarrassing pay rise.

But no. “It’s about your expenses at the hotel,” he said, pointing to a fax.

“I don’t mind that you obviously had a bottle of the hotel’s finest wines. And a three-course dinner is fine by me. But what’s this?”

He passed the paper across and under the charges were listed: lager, lager, chocolate, whisky, chocolate, whisky, chocolate, lager, chocolate.

It was stuff from the mini-fridge. I’d hardly consumed any of it but everything I’d picked up to inspect had registered electronically as a charge.

How we laughed, particularly when he said: “Here, have another pay rise.”

God, this is starting to read like ancient history now, and it wasn’t that long ago. Another time, in Liverpool, I popped my head out of the window and was screamed at by a gaggle of young girls down below.

I waved back, then realised it was for the pop group at the windows upstairs. I bumped into my poetic hero, Roger McGough (he who wrote agreeably: “I came, I saw, I concurred”) in the lift of that same hotel.

If there is a lift in Nicola’s hotel, I hope she doesn’t get stuck in it with daft Wullie Rennie, the editor of the Daily Nutter and two delegates to the annual conference of Halitosis Pride.

She’ll be dying to get back to her ain hoose, with its iron, its fridge full of unmetered lager and chocolate, and the only noise coming from inebriated executives singing Barnacle Bill the Sailor after a night oot in the nearby west end.