Steal a hotel towel? You couldn’t pay me enough to take one home

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

Crossword

Polygon

Sudoku

Did you think our brazen thieving and shoplifting epidemic could get no worse? How naive! I bet when you started work you were sent out to buy a glass hammer, some tartan paint and a four-legged tripod.

Because we are merely in the foothills, my friends. This week it emerged that a woman strolled into a Manchester restaurant and casually stole … the bathroom sink (allegedly). Astonished staff at the Jardim Rodizio Grill in Altrincham produced CCTV footage that appears to show the woman sauntering into the ladies’ toilet with an empty tote bag and then leaving with the bag now full — and a £150 imitation stone bowl missing, along with some pipework.

Interesting. If this kind of thing takes off, waiters will soon have to accompany diners to the lavatory and whistle awkwardly like teachers did during school exams (experienced cheaters, of course, stuffed the answers down their knickers because Sir was hardly going to look down there. Hopefully!).

This is another example of the despicable “I want, I take” contagion, but I can at least see the point in stealing a sink. You’ve saved yourself £150 and a very boring trip to B&Q. I see no point whatsoever in stealing the item most often nicked from hotels. Namely towels. Some 79 per cent of hotels told a survey that these are by far the most pilfered objects, which I don’t get and never will.

You could not pay me to take home a rectangle of material on which at least 327 businessmen (or women) have vigorously and lovingly flossed their bottom cleft. Oh yes they have. And worse.

It is well known that guests have no respect for room towels, using them to wipe up food mess and bodily fluids or as makeshift pedestal mats around the lavatory. Remember, as you pat yourself down with one of Marriott’s pilfered bath sheets, that it spent three days being a urine-puddle mat for Roger from Babbacombe. Oh, I know the old joke goes: “I hate hotel towels. They’re so thick and fluffy I can barely close my suitcase!” But if you steal one the joke’s on you because you may as well dry your face with Roger’s Y-fronts.

The only things worse to steal (and sensibly few people do) are those rarely washed counterpanes that studies have shown are awash with unmentionable fluids. I immediately pull them off the bed while shrieking to my family: “Don’t touch this bedspread. It might impregnate you!”

But I’m equally bewildered that the next most stolen item after bathrobes (ugh) is coat hangers. Nearly 50 per cent of hotels say this is the third highest purloined thing. Are people stupid? Hotel coat hangers, Satan’s work, are designed to be useless in normal wardrobes, a headless stub that you have to shove into the ring but can’t and then all your clothes fall off anyway so you must use the iron. A recent survey showed idiots use this to heat up cheese sandwiches and pizza slices. So good luck to your nice silk blouse.

What do people do with these stubby decapitated hangers? Actually, don’t answer that. I believe they take them because some people will steal literally anything: mattresses, lightbulbs, hairdryers, toilet rolls, lamps, even the batteries from the hotel TV remote, which I won’t touch until it’s wrapped in its condom, ie the shower cap.

Jamie Oliver once complained that customers at his restaurants thieved so many handles and flushers from his traditional Thomas Crapper toilets that they had to be welded on.

The answer for hotels, clearly, is to make furnishings so hideous and unattractive that no one in their right mind would steal them. I must say it’s a tactic that Britannia hotels, once voted the UK’s worst hotel chain for 11 consecutive years, seems to deploy superbly.

Poor Gwen, the dalmatian-vizsla cross. She is banned from Crufts because her “happy tail syndrome’ condition, in which dogs injure themselves through excessive wagging, meant her tail had to be amputated.

It is an offence to show dogs with docked tails at fee-paying events. Good. But how ironic that Crufts is having to draw the line at this when last year its controversial winner was a squashed-faced French bulldog that campaigners said had “no discernible nostrils”.

“Oh no!” Gwen the dog told The Times. “You mean I won’t now get shoved in a crate to be driven for hours from Wales to Birmingham NEC to spend more hours sitting with wheezing plate-faced pugs or bored poodles having poncey blow-drys? What am I supposed to do now? Chase a rabbit? Roll happily in a field like dogs are supposed to do? Seriously, FML.”

I expect you have thrown out all your thongs and G-strings now that “big pants” are back and it’s no longer the rage to slice your “difference” like an old Edam cheese. But the new burning question is — what are your granny knickers made of? Because bamboo undies with panels between the legs are now being billed as the answer to “chafing” and being sold at John Lewis. And there was me thinking bamboo was for one’s other “garden”.

There are also boxer shorts. They feature a “3D pouch” to keep things separate while using breathable viscose material and “moisture wicking”.

Yes, yes, but what women will want to know is — do they prevent VPLs and “lady valley”? Aka “front wedgie”? Aka “camel toe”. An entire industry is built on devices to smooth things down below so that in tight Lycra the area doesn’t resemble a catcher’s mitt.

Never mind chafing, which women have endured with tight, stoic smiles for years. If the bamboo knickers produce a contourless “mound” then we can only hope those women who wear eye-bleeding flesh-coloured leggings will buy without delay.