Stornoway; Thursday, 19 June, 2025

My flight wasn’t due out until 09:50 the following morning, and it being City Airport there probably would have been more than enough time to get up at a reasonable time and make it over to the airport, but when I’d booked the trip, I’d decided to be cautious and booked a hotel near the airport, just in case.

That turned out to be an excellent decision as the heat in London had been slowly building over the previous couple of days, and the last two nights sleep in the hot muggy conditions, even with a fan running all night, was difficult, so I was looking forward to having a night in a modern hotel with sweet, sweet air-conditioning pumping out a cold blast to sleep deeply in.

After finishing work, I headed across town to the hotel and checked in and headed up to my room to find that the aircon was off and the room was quite stuffy. I tried changing the settings on the panel – 16C, strong fan, cool, but nothing happened, and after 10 minutes I was about to head down to reception when I just happened to look at the top of the panel.

On the very top, hidden by the surround, in white plastic, on a white plastic background, was a small button. I pressed it and a couple of seconds later the air-con roared into service.

I headed down to the hotel restaurant to grab some dinner and by the time I made it back up to my room it was at a temperature where I wondered if perhaps, I should get my hoodie out of my bag to warm up a bit.

Given the lack of decent sleep for the previous few nights I turned in just after the last plane of the night roared off from the take-off zone of City’s runway, a suitably aviation friendly 747ft from my window, and was pretty soon in deep sleep.