Dear Sir,

We all love a bargain, and it can be quite galling to pay the kinds of rates some hotels see as normal for very basic facilities, so I applaud your pricing strategy. I also very much appreciated the warm welcome on arrival and being asked about my day, though perhaps then asking for an in-depth breakdown of my weekend was a little excessive.

You asked for feedback on how my stay could be improved, so I thought it was only right to offer this, in the spirit of goodwill you already displayed. Here are a few suggestions for future guests.

1. If you are advertising an en-suite double room, the term tends to be used when the bathroom has a toilet as well as washing facilities. Indeed, it more normally applies for hotel rooms which have a separate shower and wash room, rather than a shower cubicle and sink squashed in the corner of the bedroom.

2. Indeed, on the subject of ‘double room’, this normally refers to a room large enough to accommodate two people and not a small room with a three-quarter sized bed squeezed up against the wall leaving little space to access the bathroom facilities.

3. Which reminds me – perhaps you might consider more than one toilet between 14 rooms? While it was nice to get to know the other guests, some were a little agitated and not so inclined to conversation.

4. Many hotel residents, including myself, like to be able to leave a window ajar at night. Sadly this was not possible, for fear of dislodging the toilet roll stuffed in the cracks whose purpose, I can only assume, was to prevent drafts. You might wish to think about the logistics around that one.

5. I need to mention the pillows. I understand you may be responding to customer demand by providing harder pillows, though perhaps you may have tended to one end of the scale, if not beyond. Less attractive to guests might be their infusion with cigarette smoke, though whether this occurred recently or before the smoking ban was difficult to tell.

6. Thank you for the clean sheets and (eventually) hot water, which are ultimately the most important things of all. Thank you also for the sachets of shampoo and the bar of soap. I do wonder whether the latter can really be categorised as ‘gentle’, however, given that it was in fact a hard block of nondescript substance which refused to lather.

7. For reasons of simple flood avoidance, it is useful if shower doors can actually be shut. I did manage to dislodge one of them after a struggle, but the flakes of material this generated left me loath to attempt moving the other. This was a particular issue given the propensity of the shower head to flick off its mounting.

8. It is always a bonus to have coffee and tea facilities. However, given the small size of the room, I would question the merits of having a full-sized fridge, which limited access to the wardrobe. It might also help to have a kettle that can be filled at the sink without resorting to filling it using the tooth mug.

9. On the staircases, I understand that hanging pictures on the walls is intended to add to the ambiance, but their positive impact can be diminished if the pictures are left to slide to the bottom of the frame.

10. In the breakfast room, it can be helpful to label the vessels containing coffee and tea, particularly when they taste quite similar so that guests can get a better mental image of what they are supposed to be drinking. The label on the “scrambled eggs” was much more helpful, as I wasn’t sure.

11. Finally, please do not leave pairs of underpants on the flat roof above the breakfast room, as this might be off-putting for diners.

I hope these suggestions for small improvements might benefit your establishment, and wish you every success in the future.

Kind regards.

The weekend before I was due to fly to Mumbai, I was starting to feel quite excited. A whole new continent and a whole new experience – having heard various things (positive and negative) about the place, I was keen to know in which camp I would find myself. And of course, travelling to any new place is always going to be a thrill.

On the Sunday night, twenty-four hours before I was due to fly, I went through some last-minute checks. “I know,” I thought, “I’ll take a look at the Indian Embassy web site to see if there’s anything I need to take.” Sure enough, there was something: a visa. I checked the Embassy opening times – visas were issues 11am to 2pm – not a problem, I decided, I could get the later train and arrive about ten minutes to eleven. Plenty of time.

The next day, well-rested, I caught the expected train and headed into central London, arriving at The Strand at precisely 10.50. The Indian Embassy was at one end of a D-shaped block, about 200 yards in diameter. As I approached, I started to focus on, then tried to suppress an emerging feeling of panic as I realised the queue stretching all the way round the ‘D’ was probably the queue for visas.

For a few minutes I stood near the head of the queue in a state somewhat resembling shock. An exhaled string of semi-expletives drew me to the attention of a tall Rastafarian who was leaning against a litter bin next to me. “What’s up mate?” he asked, and I explained my predicament. “Not a problem,” he said. “See that bloke there, near the head of the queue? That’s my mate, he’s got all our passports, he can take yours as well if you like.” A few seconds was all it took to realise this was the only option I had, so I handed over my passport nervously (he was a total stranger, after all) but with equal relief.

Tens of minutes passed; progress was glacial. After a while, the people at the head of the queue started to disperse. I wondered whether they had just got fed up… but my new companion they were just getting tokens. “They’re closing for lunch,” he said. “Only those with tokens can come back after.” My gorge rose, then quickly subsided as I saw his friend walking towards us, beaming and clutching a handful of tokens. Giving one to me, the pair wished me luck and went on their way.

Suppressing a desire to raise my arms to the heavens and shout “Alleluia!” I decided to check I was absolutely prepared – I’d made one mistake and I didn’t’ want to mess up again. I headed across the road to a branch of Prontaprint, which had wifi (and, as it happened, print services), and logged back onto the Embassy web site. Ah. “Don’t forget to bring a letter of introduction,” it said. No problem I thought, printing off the invitation email I had been sent. I was all set.

An hour later I queued, clutching my token like a schoolboy with a shilling, and before long I was granted entry to the dimply lit, teak-lined room that was the visa issue bureau. It looked like a cross between an old bank branch and a visiting room at a prison. No matter, I was in – I sat on the hard bench and waited my turn. Suddenly, so it seemed, my number was called and I stepped forward to the counter, all forms and paperwork complete.

So I thought. “I’d like a business visa, please,” I said, handing everything over. The man on the other side of the plexiglass had clearly been to international clerical bureaucracy school, that’s the only place I can imagine to learn the nuanced slowness that is the same the world over. Eventually, he paused. “Where is your letter of introduction?” he asked, so I pointed him to the email. “But this isn’t…” he spluttered. I was in trouble. I could feel the muscles in his back starting to knot in unison with mine. “You can’t… there is no way…” I was completely helpless. “What am I to do?” I pleaded, my face a picture of desperation.

He exhaled deeply and his shoulders slumped, then he rose again in his chair (“Here it comes,” I thought…). “I am very sorry, I have no choice,” he said, authoritatively now. “I’m going to have to… (exhale) …I’m going to have to give you a tourist visa.” Bang BANG went his stamp in my passport, which he slid back towards me. “Thank you. Good bye. NEXT!”

I nearly ran out of the place. The sun may have been shining, but if it wasn’t I probably would have displayed an unearthly glow. By now it was about 3pm, ample time to head to Heathrow, check in and make my flight. What about Mumbai? Suffice to say, I loved it – the people, the sounds, the smells. Brilliant.

A few months later, I happened to be talking to someone else who was heading to India. “Not going for a few months yet,” they said. “Off to the doctor’s next week, to get my jabs.”

“Jabs?” I said. “What jabs?”

In about 6 weeks’ time I will be sleeping rough, under the banner of Byte Night. I won’t really be sleeping rough, of course. I will take my old, but functional sleeping bag, carry mat and reasonably healthy self to London for the day, bed down in the evening, have an awful night’s sleep (but think of the camaraderie), then head back the next day for a decent shower and that inner warm feeling that I’ve done something useful.

Call me old fashioned, but that’s not sleeping rough. Sleeping rough means the feeling of nowhere else to go, no money to pay for the fares, no hot shower to look forward to. Sleeping rough could mean sofa surfing on occasion, or being offered a place in a hostel but lacking the wherewithal to respond. As a genuine rough sleeper, chances are I would have psychological challenges, demons in my own machine. I wouldn’t have asked for these, they may be in my DNA. Or, perhaps, I’ve faced, but not faced down some traumatic experience, such as domestic violence, loss of livelihood or family. I might well have ended up with a drugs problem: that wouldn’t have been in my life plan either.

So, if I’m not really sleeping rough, why am I doing it? First, to help raise awareness of a growing problem. The credit crunch has hit people from all walks of life – since 2010 the amount of homelessness in the UK has continued to rise. According to charity Crisis, in Autumn 2011 the number of rough sleepers in the UK averaged over two thousand every night – an increase of just over a quarter from the year before. A sharp increase in a tip-of-the-iceberg figure which hides the true scale of the challenge.

Sleeping rough isn’t a simple decision, it’s a bottom point on a complex, downward-spiralling journey. A number of organisations are working independently and together to minimise the causes of homelessness, maximise the options for people who want to get out of the rut, and provide any palliative help they can for people sleeping on the street. These organisations need money and resources to do their work, and Byte Night is at its core simply a call for funds for Action for Children, which targets young homeless people – all donations gratefully received.

Finally, I have a lot to learn. Quite recently I became involved in a community interest organisation that is being spun out of homeless charity St Mungo’s. We don’t have a name yet (unless you count ‘Social Inclusion Enterprises’) – but the remit is simple – to employ low-cost technologies to respond to the needs of people at the periphery of society, be they homeless, long-term unemployed or otherwise disadvantaged for whatever reason. Services such as Voicemail4All for example, which can offer a communications lifeline, helping its users find a job or reconnect with family members.

So, no, I will not be sleeping rough on October 5, not in its truest sense. But nor should anyone else, not in this day and age. As long as ‘modern society’ feels it is acceptable to leave individuals curled up on street corners, we still need events like Byte Night to ensure that they, and their needs are not forgotten.

And once again, a bijou record label that has been developed from the ground up through hard work and dedication, and which then sees the next logical step as accepting the advances of a larger, more powerful and seemingly equally dedicated organisation. Perhaps indeed, the initial intentions are sound, and new artists join the fold in the knowledge they’re getting the best of both worlds.

But then comes the reality – that despite an upturn in fortunes, business is tougher than expected, there’s an economic downturn don’t you know. The finance people juggle the figures, which senior management are forced to acknowledge mean tough decisions. Which are taken, to the detriment of both staff and artists large and small.

Farewell, Roadrunner Records.

Addendum – here’s the final section of Cees Wessels, RoadRunner CEO’s original statement:

“…We can take Roadrunner to the next level by focusing our resources on marketing our existing line-up of acclaimed artists as well as discovering the stars of tomorrow.”

The universe. Profound in its enormity. The detailed atomic structure of a particle in the depths of space, simultaneously illustrating both immeasurable breadth and infinite detail. And likewise we are specks, motes, purposeless fragments floating in our own, great beyond like those very flakes of skin and soil, buffeted by Brownian motion and attracted by still-unexplained laws of gravity and static onto your shelves and the inner surfaces of your electronic devices.

And yet even as we, these miniscule scattered, inconsequential shavings, mere powder filed from that universal grand design, even as we somehow avoid the inevitably grim consequences of our improbable existence, marking each cycle of our tiny planet round the sun as a notch on some celestial stick of achievement, we still strive for explanations, from fulfilled prophecies to punctuated equilibria. We share this common urge for meaning and yet we have different priorities, each of us loosely woven filaments in the threadbare carpet we call civilisation.

Speaking of carpet, you might want to try vacuuming yourself sometime. You might enjoy it.