Staying at a hotel in Lucerne in Switzerland, our reader was woken in the middle of the night by his wife as the fire alarm sounded. Looking back, the reader says sleeping with earplugs in a hotel is something he’d also think twice about in the future. If you missed Stephen’s column over the weekend, here’s his simple, safe method for drying clothes in a hotel room. My hotel room no longer looks like the older tenement neighbourhoods of Mumbai, India (where there are massive, open-air laundries). I lay a towel on the hotel bathroom floor, roll my small washed items in it and do the same.