John and I are currently on our regular trip to Amsterdam where we produce a daily newsletter from an enormous cleaning exhibition at the RAI. We walk miles, work long hours and consequently I've been somewhat out of touch with my KBB industry colleagues and what's been going on in the UK. When John asked me to email my leader across I thought: "What the heck am I going to write about?" An hour later I'm still no closer to finding anything entirely relevant, so what follows has only the most tenuous links to the KBB industry - although I hope it will get you thinking - and prompt some response.

I rather like staying away from home but hotel rooms are always a revelation and I'm often left wondering whether the designers actually try them out before going ahead with their plans. Things such as sockets being set too far away from mirrors/the bed so you can't use hair styling appliances while seeing what you're doing/use your laptop while in bed - or sockets set too close to the surface of the desk so you have to move the desk out to be able to plug the laptop in... you know what I mean, don't you? The absence of full length mirrors and decent lighting can also make it difficult to get ready in a rush (particularly when you're suffering from the effects of a late night) and sometimes I have to spend a while fathoming out how to get the shower to the right sort of temperature - or even sometimes working at all.

The thing I can't get my head around though is why all the freshly laundered towels are so darned sticky that you feel you need another shower after you've used them! What exactly are we wiping over our newly washed bodies? And why do hotels insist on giving us a clean towel every morning so there's no hope of avoiding the stickiness? I know some hotels only change towels you've deliberately left on the floor as a sign that you want them changed, but not nearly enough of them do.

Just think how much water is wasted each day, with towels in hotel rooms all over the world being changed unnecessarily! Why are we happy to condone this enormous waste of water? And as an industry that supplies these hotels with sanitary ware in the first place, aren't we in a great position to persuade them to consider only changing our towels when we indicate that we want them to? As I said at the top, I'd love your comments on this...

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Yours,

Jan Hobbs