Ten irksome things about hotel stays

1. Rooms close to ‘talking' elevators: ‘Ding dong!' ‘Doors closing!' ‘Going up!'... It's 3am and I'm not sure whether I am awake or dreaming.

2. Sleeping beside alarm clocks with halogen-powered digital displays that can be read with your eyes closed.

3. Identical-looking bottles containing different beauty products all labelled in tiny writing. I once washed my hair with hand lotion. Luckily it washed out OK with what I later discovered to be mouthwash.

4. Towels "creatively" made into animal shapes: They always look like they're making fun of me and seem to know something I don't.

5. The follow-up call from the front desk after checking in: nine out of ten times it comes when you're in the bathroom.

6. Bedside control panels with more buttons than the elevators in the Empire State Building: All I need to do is switch off the lights before going to bed, not re-engineer the universe.

7. Reading lamps that can't be focused properly. The reading lights are too bright while the desk lights are too weak. So should I be sleeping on the desk and working in bed?!

8. Double, triple or quadruple-wrapped soap bars: Sometimes I wonder if it's a soap bar and not a piece of toxic waste that somebody is protecting me from touching accidentally!

9. Frozen butter at breakfast. You can cook my omelette in a minute, yet you can't provide me with butter that doesn't take crate-size chunks of bread out when I try to spread it.

10. Electrical sockets in positions that can only be reached by Yoga masters.