Let me give you some advice. If you’re ever thinking of going to Wantage, don’t. If you’re ever considering staying in the Bear Hotel, maybe you should also consider shooting yourself. You’re likely to get a similar amount of pleasure from each and shooting is a bit more exciting.

The Bear happens to be the only hotel in Wantage, which is why I’ve just spent four days staying there. From the outside it looks decent enough, a fairly pleasant old building with a pub on the ground floor. The pub is to be fair perfectly adequate. The food is passable and the barman has a good sense of humour and let me have my lemonades on the house :)  But the hotel itself is a different story altogether.

Our adventure started when we checked into reception on Monday evening. Between two of us we had two rucksacks, two cases of clothes and two exceptionally heavy cases of files. We’d just dragged these halfway across Wantage because the hotel doesn’t have a car park, and thus were rather tired. Being informed that our rooms were on the second floor, we decided to take the lift.

The lift. It was easily located next to reception. We crammed ourselves into it, closed the doors and pressed the buttons. Nothing happened. Thankfully the doors opened again without a glitch. The receptionist saw us exiting it and helpfully informed us that it was out of order. Oh okay, we should have noticed that from the great big invisible out of order sign I guess.

No choice remained to us but to tackle the stairs. We could only carry one case at a time so we were both forced to make two trips to the second floor. Arriving panting at the stairwell for the second time, we set off in search of our rooms.

I strode off through the unlit lounge, opened the door at the far end and promptly fell down three steps which I must have been warned of by another invisible sign. I turned sharply to left, down a narrow corridor, round a corner and up three steps. Through a door, turn to the right, down three steps. At this point we met a man coming in the opposite direction. The corridor not being wide enough for two people to pass, he was forced to reverse all the way back to his room.

After this rather frustrating hike, we finally arrived at our rooms. The first thing I noticed about mine was that the door was secured only by a Yale lock, of the variety which even I can get through with a credit card. Upon opening the door, my second though was “Where’s my room?!” instead of being presented with a view of a bedroom, i found myself in yet another corridor. Turning right in this, I finally found the room.

On first glance it didn’t seem too bad. The bathroom wasn’t as clean as I would have liked a bathroom to be, but I wasn’t planning on using the shower anyway so it didn’t matter. The curtains were, I later discovered, very thin so that the room never got quite as dark as I prefer to comfortably sleep in, and my view was of Wantage police station which led to a bit of noise in the night when police cars set off to deal with incidents.

The walls were also paper thin. I mean I expect to hear a few TVs when I’m in a hotel, but this is the first time I’ve been able to hear the people in the room next door flick the light switch above the bed.

Despite this Monday night passed relatively without incident. It was Tuesday night when things got hairy.

I went to sleep about half twelve, having been busy offloading my work on Tim. At half one I was rudely awakened by knocking on my door. Now, when I say knocking, I don’t mean a little polite tapping. This was rather violent banging, accompanied by loud drunken shouts of “let me in!” Needless to say, I was rather frightened. I put the light on and made my way cautiously to the door. It was visibly vibrating from the force of the attack and I was kind of worried the lock might give way. There was no catch to drop and no heavy furniture I could move in front of it. The knocking got increasingly frenzied and the screaming increasingly animalistic, until finally the guy in the room next door opened up and informed his friend that he had the wrong door.

Phew. Or so I thought. It turned out the guys were very friendly indeed and I had several delightful hours listening to them alternately “interacting” and throwing up. Lovely

I must have fallen asleep at some point because I was woken again at half four by more banging at my door. I have no idea why. This repeated several times and in the end I was lying in bed with the light on holding a key in my hand, that being the best weapon I could muster. By the time morning came I was thoroughly exhausted and struggled to get through the day at work.

The next night was thankfully somewhat quieter, but I was annoyed by the fact that the bulb in my bathroom had died and no one was able to replace it for me. It was also irritating that when I ordered a continental breakfast I was informed in broken English that they didn’t have any this week.  The place is definitely a fire trap too. Had there been an emergency there is absolutely no way I would have found my way out of that maze of corridors, and the lack of fire instructions in my room must have been breaking the law.

You may think I was just exceptionally unlucky with my neighbours. BUT, a colleague of mine stayed in the same hotel last year and had a similar experience. Her room was on the ground floor opening onto the alleyway by the pub, and each night she had drunken people hammering on her door.

I spoke to someone at the client on Friday about where we’d been staying and his face was a picture of horror. He asked me how the fleas were. Apparently he’d put some American business visitors there last year and had to move them after two days. He said he wouldn’t stay there if you paid him.

One final point worth making is that this hotel isn’t even particularly cheap. At 65 quid a night, I’d rather stay in Fawlty Towers.

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