Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Friday, August 27, 2004

I realise that the whole point about 4-star hotels is that they are nice. After all, this is why they are not, for example, 1-star hotels. What is a 1-star hotel, anyway? A bench with a goat on?

Anyway, I am writing this early on Thursday morning at this hotel. I have been bumped to an apartment, and I am feeling quite oppressed by how nice a place can be if you have no possessions in it, a cleaner every day and recessed lighting. God, I want to live somewhere like this. Possibly with a saxophone.

There is in fact something terribly seductive about hotel living - free cable, tiny sachets every morning, batshit old ladies writing novels and having loud sex with toyboys two doors down… The presence of a cafetiere, an espresso machine and a kettle (so tiny! Tiny kettle for batchpad!) has reduced me to wibbling, and that's before we even get onto the dual bath and shower (why? When do two people need to get clean but have philosophical differences about how?). I know that tomorrow the shower controls will test my ability to comprehend them.

And tomorrow I will be back at my flat, which is spacious and familiar, and the faults of which have probably been dwelled upon a little too much of late. I ponder moving every so often, just to get a working hot water tap in the bathroom sink. It's an extreme solution, but might actually be less hassle than dobbing my landlords in to the council. I suppose I do pay rates for just such services. Dobbing, that is.

And back here, there are five different light switches in the bedroom. It's odd to be in one of these places so early - to have time to wander about a bit and still get 3 hours of sleep. The tiny sachets, the tiny sachets are calling.

And the fruit basket full, inexplicably, of lemons and limes. To ward off scurvy from a diet of club sandwiches?

Other happy-making things: Arsenal extend their unbeaten Premiership run to 43 games. There's something almost sacrilegious and certainly pusillanimous about disliking Arsenal at this point - all one can really do is look in wonder. Bentley scores for Norwich (wonder again - Bentley is out on loan). Jeffers starts the long road back to not being an enormous waste of money. The phrase Hedley Verityesque exists… I would love to see this exhibition - shame I didn't end up at BiCon really. It's a good thing today was so grindingly awful, and tomorrow shall be so exhausting and catchup flavoured, or I might simply float off.

Oh god, and the bathroom door is a single slab of frosted glass. I am in love. I need to move in.

1 Comments:

Either they thought you were an alcoholic and needed the limes and lemons so you could put them in the contents of the mini-bar (the vitamin C would help your condition as well) or you got what was left after they put the really nice stuff in everybody else's room.

Could you open and close the curtains with a little switch on the bed-head? You might just remember me telling you about that little feature in my room at the St. James Club in Paris (it was the Le Bourget show and I was with the boys from Brazil).

By Anonymous, at 11:20 AM