'We should be gone by dinner time, lunch time as you call it down south; our train back home is a bit after five. What makes you ask that?'
'I usually let the rooms midday to midday, but you could have until four o'clock say, I'll still have time to put the rooms to rights before the next people arrive.'
'Just one more question. I take it you have no objections to, I don't know how to put it exactly, what you might call continentals.'
Puzzled I said, 'Doesn't matter to me where you come from.'
'It's not that, we're all from Newcastle. There's a particular club we go to, if you get my meaning.'
'Sorry, I'm not with you.'
'It's a bit difficult to say over the phone,' he said, evidently expecting me to read his mind.
'All denominations, races and nationalities are welcome, if that answers your question.'
'Well it does sort of.'
His booking meant displaying the No Vacancies signs in the windows for the first time, and their arrival marked the end of the quiet manageable first months of business, and the beginning of a much busier and hectic phase. For the first time I experienced how exhausting and unpredictable running a hotel can be.
When they appeared in the hall, nothing about their appearance or speech explained the mention of continentals. Voluble lusty lads in their twenties and thirties, they might have been mistaken for a party of football supporters. As I reached out to take their room keys from the rack one of them asked where the hotel register was. They had already supplied a full list of names and addresses by post with their deposit, but before I could tell them there was no need to sign the register two of them spotted it on the hall table.
'There it is!' The whole group rushed towards it, pushing and shoving each other in a playful scrum, shouting 'I'm next,', 'Come on now, I've got my pen ready here,' and 'The last one to sign has to carry everyone else's bags up to the rooms.'
They had come down to London determined to have fun, which to them meant drinking heavily, having casual sex, and maintaining their incessant loud and excited banter. When talking they often spat out their words like bursts of fire from a machine gun. They seemed to know every gay venue in London and what sort of crowd it attracted. They joked and teased each other tirelessly, involving anyone else in the vicinity in their foolery. They were always lively, often amusing, occasionally very funny, and in their regional dialect sometimes completely incomprehensible to anyone but each other.