Wednesday, 22 January 2014

Road warrior

The aphorism “home is where the heart is” might sometimes more accurately be stated as home is where the heart should be.  For 15 years, I spent more time travelling than at home and I once calculated that it was over twelve months since I’d slept more than three consecutive nights in my own bed.  It is a common conceit of consultants, stated in a regretful tone but with implicit pride, that Heathrow is their real home.

For the road warrior, hotels become second homes, and one becomes highly attuned to their nuances and imperfections.  Occasionally during my travels I suffered the intruded hotel room.  Not the scenario beloved of romcoms where a fey beauty inadvertently enters the wrong room (same number, different floor) with predictable results.  Less dramatically, after checking in and interrogating reception to ensure that the allocated room meets my requirements (no smoking, high floor, away from the elevators) I open the door to find the room, although empty, has not been serviced.  Used towels on the floor, bedclothes rumpled, chairs askew, I retreat in horror.  The disjunction between the expectation and the squalid reality jangles more than is justified merely by the sight of an unmade bed.  Such a scene in a friend’s flat would elicit no reaction beyond the silent observation that their domestic habits betray divergence from their public persona.  But the success of a hotel depends upon sustaining the illusion that what is essentially a public place has all the attributes of a private space, so that it is acceptable to perform there the intimate behaviours normally confined to home.  The recreation of a pristine environment is an essential component in constructing the fantasy that you are the first and only person ever to occupy your room and it must be flawlessly executed to mask the knowledge that you are, in fact, a passing guest, that someone else slept there last night and that there will be a new incumbent tomorrow.  Any evidence of previous occupation punctures this facade and even erodes faith in the wider competency of the institution.  This is why hotels have rigorous inspection regimes to detect cleaning transgressions, trivial in themselves, such as the odd hair in the shower.  Canny travellers know how to milk any shortcomings in their experience.  Managers keen to retain the goodwill of regular guests are empowered to rectify disappointments by offering minor privileges normally reserved for more distinguished clients: a complimentary bottle of wine, a room upgrade or access to the executive lounge. Lubricated by a top tier loyalty card, I was once offered a free weekend at a Hilton in Brussels.  On redeeming the offer, I was shown to a tiny room which could have passed for a converted broom cupboard.  After I pointed out that this exacerbated, rather than compensated for, the previous disappointment, I was immediately moved to the best suite. 

When my business travel days ceased, the status of my London flat subtly changed.  Instead of being a fleeting stopover to collect mail and do laundry, it became my permanent residence, punctuated only by holidays and occasional visits to friends’ houses. In other words, the normal position for most of the population.  With no early morning flights, my body clock gradually recovered equilibrium.  I no longer routinely carried a passport and my suitcases were relegated to the loft.  Successive letters from hotel chains and airlines signalled my demotion down the ranks of valued customer.  Eventually they gave up completely; for the purveyors of travel facilities I might just as well have died. 

As a transit lounge, my flat was ideally located: midway between the office and London City Airport.  But as David Lodge remarks in Changing Places, praising a location because it’s easy to get away from is at best a backhanded compliment.  Minor inconveniences in the flat, which I hadn’t noticed or simply overlooked during my itinerant days, erupted into irritations. Why were the legs on that chair perpetually falling out, how come all my plates were scratched or chipped?  Even the furniture seemed to be in the wrong place to make the most of the flat’s only substantial asset, the river view. The outside environment came under scrutiny too.  Certainly the flat’s location guaranteed relative peace and my regular three mile evening walk around the deserted docks was an enduring pleasure, but otherwise the neighbourhood had severe limitations.  Where were the pavement cafes and street markets which enliven most European cities, and even other parts of London?   

Learning to live in a flat which had been selected primarily to function as a pied a terre has been a voyage of discovery.  Now I lounge by the window in the newly positioned chair, sip my coffee and watch the aircraft arriving and leaving London City, the ascending planes rising in tandem with those landing, as though linked by an invisible thread passing along the runway.  The Thames is corrugated by a quickening wind and the horizon is defined by the breast of Shooters Hill, nippled by the disused water tower at its summit, its profile uninterrupted since the demolition of the Tate refinery.  


Anchored in Docklands, it seems the heart has tentatively taken up residence in the home.

© David Thompson 2014

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