Normally I hated huge Las Vegas hotels, but this one was an exception. The staff did everything to make you feel at home, right down to changing the name-plates on the bedroom doors each day so that guests believed that their rooms really were their very own.

The facilities on the ground floor impressed me most. Alongside the obligatory gambling hall (in which, I admit, I had no interest) there was an open-plan library. This held the full range of British newspapers and magazines laid out across big oak tables, as well as an upright magnetic Scrabble set the size of a school blackboard positioned near to the escalator. It even included a tile marked “Game in progress” so that you could take a break between moves then return to pick up the game again later on. I could happily live here forever.

Within the hotel complex there was also a huge selection of restaurants, and it was in the middle of dinner when the trouble started. NU snatched a clear plastic salt and pepper grinder from our table and dropped it into the pocket of my long black coat. I could tell that he wanted to see if I could get the grinder out of the restaurant and back to my room without being caught. I was too embarrassed to object, and by the time we left the table I had forgotten all about the hot property inside my pocket.

Our next stop was the hotel cinema. Like everything else, this was vast. Each row of seats even included special tables for storing popcorn buckets. To gain access to the cinema, however, you first had to pass through security where everyone was subjected to an airport-style search. While the super-friendly all-American security guard launched into a full ancestral history to support his claim of Scottish nationality, I was panicking over how to extract the grinder from my pocket and deposit it somewhere where it would not be noticed. I slid it onto the ground against the wall and prayed that my actions were not being recorded on CCTV.