“Which room do you want?” asked my friend Amy.

We had arrived in the resort of Courchevel and had dragged our bags into the chalet that would be home to us for the next seven days.

“I don’t mind”, I replied confirming my status as the most considerate person on the holiday.

I was pointed down the stairs to the last remaining room, in the basement. This caused a small red flag to appear in my mind. Basements are not generally nice places. They are where rats live, they flood, and they are where sociopathic killers keep people when they kidnap and torture them.

No happy story ever started with, “Well, I was in the basement and then….”

When I opened the room I was confronted with a room the size of an average family saloon. With no windows, and a pine bunk bed against the wall. I was contemplating the possibility that some horrible mistake had been made when I heard, “Bagsy the bottom bunk!” from my flatmate, who was just behind me.

Brilliant.

I dumped my bag, and headed back upstairs in order to get drunk on the complimentary booze. This free wine was a major contributing factor to my decision to go on the holiday, and now that I was sleeping on the top bunk, in a basement box room, I planned to drink my own body weight in vin rouge each and every day.

Finally the time came for everyone to go to bed, and I made my way gingerly down the stairs and into the basement room. Whilst climbing into the top bunk I noticed that the bunk bed had actually been constructed from balsa wood. Climbing the ladder almost pulled it down on me, even though I am built like a sportsman (not a darts player). I finally managed get on the top bunk and was greeted by the noise of scrunching plastic.

They had given me a fucking rubber coated mattress!!

I do not wet the bed. Not for a long long time anyway. But clearly the chalet owners are used to basement bed wetters, so I drifted off to a drunken sleep safe in the knowledge that any accidents would leave the mattress undamaged.

A lesson for you all, when a holiday deal appears to be too good to be true, check the fine print for mention of rubber mattresses and confined spaces.