Athletics: `I'm sorry. I'm an English journalist and I have fallen asleep in your toilet'

Mike Rowbottom on the perils of reporting athletics

I woke up and my trousers were around my ankles. Whatever it was, it wasn't good. I was in a place that was brightly lit and dimly familiar. My hotel room? Did I get a taxi, then?

No, not my hotel room. A toilet. A toilet in a restaurant. A toilet in a Basque restaurant. In... Spain.

I looked at my watch - how could it be 10 to 5? Because that would mean... that surely would mean I had... where were the others?

Hitching up my crumpled trousers, I unlocked the door - good sign that, must have locked the door, you should lock the door - and stepped out. Unlike the restaurant I had visited the previous evening, this was a very quiet, dark place, not at all popular. So unpopular, indeed, that I was the only one in it, although I was not entirely alone.

All around the bar, lit only by the eerie glow of the drinks cabinets, hung huge hams. These Basques, I thought, they do love their meat.

I hadn't noticed the hams on my way in. Then again, I hadn't noticed anything for five hours.

Drink, I reflected, might have played its part in my situation. Some drink had undoubtedly been drunk - a couple of beers, no more. Big ones, though. And just that one glass of red wine. Or so. But, in the evidence for the defence, the prime exhibit was surely Long Day in Hot Sun.

Madrid's Estadio de la Comunidad had turned out to be entirely open to the elements - the relevant one being fire. An hour into our early start to the day's European Cup athletics, the sun had heated us to about gas mark 6. The guys from L'Equipe had stripped down to the waist, but by noon the shirts were back on with the collars up.

Something was nagging at me... the French, always so stylish, you didn't catch them wearing ankle socks with their shorts... Nagging... sports socks, maybe, but they looked OK somehow, meant, not like the typical Englishman abroad sock, brown with a silly pattern, worn half-way up a weedy white calf... At me. The bill?

There was no way I could have paid it. I couldn't even remember what I'd eaten. Oh yes I could.

Momentarily I turned back to the cubicle I had vacated as the thought of what could fairly be termed Exhibit B for the defence - plate of odd meat - regurgitated itself. But that wasn't it. Not the bill. Not the odd meat. What?

By now I was standing at the restaurant door. On the other side was the courtyard where I had sat with a large tableful of my fellow toilers before that rising feeling - unmistakeable as grief - had drawn me discreetly and swiftly away from the jocund throng.

I wanted nothing more now than to slide between the cool sheets of my hotel bed. My hand was on the door handle. Maybe it was a door which simply locked itself as it was swung shut. Or something like that. Cool sheets, fizzy mineral water. I turned the handle.

To no effect, as far as getting out was concerned. But to considerable effect as far as filling the restaurant with a noise that resembled an LA cop car at the scene of crime was concerned. After about five minutes, the noise was replaced by a deafening silence. Then the phone behind the bar rang. And as I had no other pressing business, I answered it.

I couldn't understand what the man was saying - and he couldn't understand what I was saying. The Spanish phrase for: "I'm sorry, I'm an English journalist and I have fallen asleep in your toilet" eluded me.

It was as I put the phone down that the nagging feeling suddenly turned itself into something more tangible. It wasn't nagging any more, it was shouting in my face. Policemen in Spain carry guns! Guns!

I thought: How can I make it very clear - crystal clear, as my old headmaster would have said - that I am not a burglar?

Sit by the bar, casually, as if you have fallen asleep there. But they won't be able to see your hands. How will they know you don't have a gun or a knife? Simply stand in the middle of the room with your arms in the air. I tried this. It was just too absurd. And of course, I thought, it might make them think you've done something criminal and were owning up, whereas the image you need to foster at this point in your life is "poor, sleepyheaded Englishman."

Torch beams swung across the windows. I heard the sound of voices. Now the doors were opening, and two very large, uniformed policemen were moving towards me with guns.

My plans were as nothing. Instinctively, I embraced the international language of helplessness - palms together as if in prayer at the side of my tilted face. Then palms outstretched beseechingly.

For a moment the two big men looked at me with incomprehension. Then one glanced at the other and grinned.

By now, a rumpled man I took to be the restaurant owner - and perhaps also the owner of the voice on the phone - had joined the party, a jacket over his pyjama top. As they spoke to him, he stared at me with an expression I find hard to describe.

So what was it to be? The policemen were taking me outside now. Oh, cool sheets and mineral water...

Assume the best, I thought. "Hotel Cuzco?" I asked. And one of them pointed his finger in the right direction, sending a poor, sleepy-headed Englishman - Yesss! - off into the streetlit night.

The foregoing, obviously, is by way of a personal plea to all designers of sporting stadiums. Designers, please, go that extra mile and cover all the stands. Otherwise it will only lead to trouble...