Caroline O'Donoghue: 7 things about hotel rooms
Pic: Pixabay
Recently I had to go away for work, which means I got to stay in a hotel. I’ve always felt vaguely lawless in hotels, even the poshest ones — especially the poshest ones — and whenever I’m away on my own, I get hit with a huge adrenaline rush of being allowed to do anything, be anyone.
To stay up as late as I want, to take coke with a stranger, to throw a TV out the window. I never do any of these things. I usually just get room service and watch Netflix until I pass out. But the fact that I could do these things remains, and that’s a huge part of the appeal.
You can’t really do any of those things at a hotel right now. They feel less like an embassy for bad behaviour and more like boarding school. Due to new regulations, movement at this hotel was strictly regulated. There was one staircase for going up, another for going down.
The breakfast buffet, a place where I once saw my boyfriend so deranged with the bacchanalia that he whacked some natural yoghurt on a scone, is no longer. You have to just… order your breakfast now. Like you’re at a normal restaurant. You also have to clean your own room and turn down your own bed, between nights. Which is fine. Coronavirus, bla bla bla. But while I respect the new world, I do not have to like it, so please join me in my ode to hotel living.
I put my luggage on the carrier, I unzip my bag, and I hang up all my clothes. I put my toiletries in the bathroom. Everything is normal.
Then, I turn around, and it looks like the room of a psychopath. It looks like the photographs of the room Marilyn Monroe died in. My objects take on a new chaos when they are in a hotel room, my make-up slumping over and staining all the white face cloths orange.
My deodorant bottle keeps going missing and showing up on a random end table. Every surface is littered with the plastic wrapper of a small biscuit.
Oh, how I love the small biscuits. When you’re travelling for work, your life is a series of rooms with small, wrapped biscuits in them.
Those Lotus ones with the red wrappers are obviously best, but you might also get an individually-wrapped shortbread.
The small biscuits must be hoarded. For some reason, your hotel is never within walking distance of a decent Spar, and I’m forever paranoid that I’ll get back to the room and have nothing to snack on.
The biscuits go in my bag, to be gorged on later in bed. When I’m done, I roll over to the un-biscuited side and go to sleep.
It makes me feel like Miss Honey, out of Matilda. A simple life of small treasures! UHT milk, bags of crap tea, a sachet of Nescafe instant!
I am an attractive, beleaguered spinster with a terrible secret and children love me.
The Chill Out Zone is two horrible chairs, and one round table. Once upon a time, I suppose this was the place where you wrote your postcards, informing your family that you were having a lovely time and/or leaving them for your lover, John.
Now no one sends postcards, but hoteliers don’t seem to have the heart to take The Chill Out Zone away.
Instead, the Chill Out Zone is where your discarded knickers and tights get thrown at the end of every evening, when you’re so knackered from being a human being that you need to find a new home, hermit-crab style, in the hotel dressing gown.
Purity. Comfort. Wisdom. There comes a point in the hotel stay where I am so glued to the big fluffy white dressing gown that I feel like I’m a cowboy in a Western, and she is my loyal steed.
We are two separate entities, but we move as one. Greasy hair in a bun, ingrown hairs casually being tweezed in front of the 6 o’clock news. Nothing is too disgusting or feral as long as you have The Robe on.
At some point in a multi-night stay, hotel room elation turns subtly into a Howard Hughes-esque hotel depression. Your relaxation turns to inertia.
Your back hurts and you seem to have run out of fresh towels. You force yourself to leave the hotel, even if it’s just to have a drink alone in the hotel bar, or have a solo dinner in a rapidly closing Thai restaurant that is politely trying to hurry you out of there.
You return every evening like a depressed husband to an embittered wife. The marriage is over. You can’t wait to leave tomorrow.
Sunlight streaming through the windows, you pack your bag and you feel a strange… something as you leave.
You will never visit this room again, this room you have developed such an intense relationship with. The Robe will be steam-cleaned and then someone else will pluck their in-grown hairs in it. In just a few hours, it will be like you were never in this room at all.
Troubling thoughts of life and death, of what it all means, of how quickly the world will move on from you no matter how hard you try to leave your mark. You think, briefly, about stealing the robe. You don’t. You leave your hotel room, and hear the door softly click behind you.
