I slept in a bedroom - with a twist...
...many moons ago, when hangovers were a slight inconvenience rather than 24 hours of purgatory, I would, from time to time, take a drink.

On one such disgraceful debautch, I'd arranged with my drinking partner, who lived close-in to town, that I should use his couch rather than face a several-miles walk back to my own luxurious quarters. We were but poor students you see and cabs were not for the likes of us.

Apparently the drinking went very well indeed and I awoke in the morning tired, with a headach and upset stomach - mission accomplished.

I blearily regarded my surroundings, which were quite obviously an absolutely reeking student's bedroom, but not one I recognised. I took a quick gander out of the window and saw the patio outside my mate's flat.

Unfortunately my mate lived in the ground floor flat and I was peering out of a first floor window. Worse yet, there were voices on the landing outside and the sounds of people shuffling about betwixt bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom. The same people had been dismissed by my mate just the previous week as "arsey bastards". Discovery and capture seemed imminent!

I took the only escape, which was to Errol-Flynn it out of the place by opening the sash window, hanging by my fingertips to shorten the fall, then dropping to the ground below. My friend was rather surprised to be awoken by my furtive tapping at his window, but good soul that he was, he let me in and got some good strong coffee on the go.

During the post-mortem, we established that I'd got tired and emotional at an early stage and wandered off home without first snagging the key to the flat off my friend. Examination of the kitchen roof tiles - for 'twas a single story add-on to side of the building - led us to believe that on finding myself barred from my allotted resting place, my indomitable bulldog spirit hadn't succumbed. Not a bit of it! I'd just climbed on a bin, onto the kitchen roof and sneaked into the upstairs flat through an open window.

Fortunately, the guardian angel which watches over wandering piss-artistes was on overtime that weekend and:

a) There was no-one in the flat to witness and / or repel me while I impersonated Raffles after a night on the pop.

and b) I picked a bedroom wherein the resident spod had got lucky that night or, more likely, had returned home to mummy for the weekend to get the washing done and pick up the week's allocation of day-of-the-week labelled frozen dinners.

All's well that ends well and I wish i could say I learned from the experience but seeing as I subsequntly "borrowed" bedrooms in a nurse's home and then in an ancient Oxford college (high ceilings and oak wainscot - mmm!), I must have been asleep at the back of the class.
(apologies_for_length, Wed 3 Jan 2007, 2:45, Reply)