Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
It was a dark and stormy night. I’ve always wanted to start a story with those words. I was in a hotel recently, in a strange part of the country. I was dead tired, and on my own. The hotel turned out to be part of a service station on one of our older motorways, and without the satnav I would have never found it. I’d probably still be circling that junction, and it would still be dark and wet and cold. They had changed the name of the hotel too, which didn’t help, so when I entered it was to ask the reception desk if they knew about any other hotels in the area, and they laughed.
It had seen better days. My expectations weren’t raised when they told me my room was ‘up the stairs and on the balcony’, and waved vaguely. The balcony overlooked a large puddled car park, filled mainly with builders’ transits. There were many rattly doors with dodgy-looking locks, and the cold wind howled down the balcony, ruffling the surface of the puddles, and dark figures scurried back and forth with carrier bags. I guessed that the van occupants were stocking up on burgers from the service station shops. I wasn’t wrong.
Jammed between the bed and the wall
The room had a bed with mismatching base and mattress, and the base had well-oiled casters, which scooted it away from under me when I tried to sit up and read. The headboard was no help in this, because it was screwed to the wall rather than the bedframe. I had visions of being found the next morning by the cleaner, folded up and jammed between the bed and the wall. I imagined her reaction would be something like – ‘Oh no! Not again!’
The windows looked like they might open, but closing them again would be a difficult job with an uncertain outcome. Besides, the force of the foul weather was hurling itself against the glass. There were ragged patches around the window frames where various suspicious materials appeared to be bulging, like the contents of a stuffed toy gaping through a tear in its fur. I backed away, drawing the curtains, my head filled with asbestos thoughts.
It had been a long day
My room had two light switches, one for the bathroom, the other for the ceiling light, which had an operating-theatre intensity. I could see two small lights for reading above the headboard, and a third light above the television and kettle shelf. They consisted of flimsy fittings with a piece of curved frosted glass screwed loosely in front. There was a wall switch for the reading lights, and one for the television shelf. When I clicked these switches, the light by the television worked but the ones by the bed didn’t. Rather than call for help, which any normal person would do, I decided to swap bulbs and complain in the morning. I just wanted to get into bed and read. It had been a long day.
It was quite easy to undo the screws on the lights, take off the glass, and swap the working bulb for the dead one. Of course, both bulbs worked by the television but neither worked by the bed. So I tried the third bulb as well, with the same result. I tried the wall switches again, but that didn’t change anything, so I gave up. While I was replacing the glass on the third light, the bulb came on. I found that I had held the metal fitting in a different way, and my thumb had activated another switch on the side of the wall fitting. Someone had switched both of these off instead of using the switch on the wall. I was too tired to be anything but grateful.
Advanced haggardness in the gloom
The lights above the mirror in the bathroom didn’t work, and I was glad not to have to see my advanced haggardness in the gloom. Luckily I have fairly luminous toothpaste and some directional sense in my wrist, and I was able to point my electric toothbrush in the right direction and close my eyes while the machine whirred away. The facilities looked like they would work, but you could see that there had been one too many replacements of fittings and repairs, so the surface of the tiles was littered with filled holes where things used to be, and the edges of everything were worn and cracked.
I went straight to sleep, and I wasn’t woken too many times by the return of groups of truckers from nowhere I could identify as a good place to spend the evening. It seemed like they had an arrangement for getting up noisily, one after the other, starting at 4:30. I lay there wondering whether they acted as alarm clocks for each other, waking the occupants of the next room one by one along the balcony. About 5:30 the last transit van roared off and it all went quiet and I fell into a deep sleep. Fifteen minutes later I was awake again, convinced that there were people in my room. I could hear them talking. It was the television. Someone had obviously discovered how to set it to switch on like an alarm clock. I couldn’t find out how to stop it, so I turned it off at the wall and gave up on sleep.
One of Life’s rites of passage
I was looking forward to a nice shower. I had to adjust both taps until the water flowed at a pleasant temperature, and then turn the handle to divert it to the shower head. It wasn’t by any means a power shower, but it was doing the job. Then the water turned very cold. Very suddenly. There’s a certain inevitability to some things that happen in life. You’ll never trip over unless you’re carrying a bag full of bottles. You’ll only ever spill drinks down yourself when you’re dressed up. And the shower will only malfunction when you’re all soaped up. Including your face.
I did a lot of jumping up and down and swearing – hopefully under my breath, but probably not. We all know what it’s like trying to find unfamiliar controls in a strange shower with soap in your eyes when you’re being sprayed with cold water. It’s one of Life’s rites of passage, and probably one of those stress tests they give to trainee astronauts or submariners. If you, dear reader, were woken up early in the morning by a maniac making a terrible racket in the bathroom of the adjoining room, please accept my sincere apologies. If the same thing happened to you, I’m sure you have behaved in a more civilised manner.
After I readjusted the water and finished in the bathroom, I saw a small notice stuck to the tiles above the shower head. It said –
That just about sums up that particular day.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
Image: Damian Gadal under CC BY 2.0
Image: Daniel Case under CC BY 2.0
Image: Ulfbastel under CC BY 2.0
Image: © With kind permission of Jonathan Dodd
Image: christianmontone under CC BY 2.0
Image: © With kind permission of Jonathan Dodd
