Last week I was staying in a Guest House, which was, I discovered, just a fancy name for a Bed & Breakfast – this week I am staying in a Private Hotel, which I have discovered is just an even fancier name for a Bed & Breakfast. The guest house I stayed in last week was pokey and I hardly had enough height to stand up in my room, I had to get fully dressed and go down 2 sets of stairs just to take a piss and the noise of the hailstones on the roof of my attic room woke me every night, but at least the bed was comfortable, the room was warm, and it was meticulously clean, I had hot water in my room, a big TV with Freeview, and a fridge to keep milk and juice. The smell of Chinese food cooking would creep up the stairs every evening and find it’s way to my hungry nostrils while I was having my dinner of custard creams and Pringles in my room. Compare that to the more expensive, pretentious-sounding ‘private hotel’ which I am staying in this week.What a shit-hole.
On first glance it seemed OK – the room is huge, and has a little shower room and toilet built into the corner. But after spending a night there, it’s shortfalls have become more apparent than Paul O’Grady’s sexual persuasion. The sheets and covers on my bed look abut 20 years old; there are stains all over the armchair which make me not want to sit on it, ever; the bathroom is filthy, every corner of every wall and roof is covered in black mould, and every surface covered in unspeakable dirt; the shower head is broken so the water dribbles out of it pathetically like a garden tap; the shower only has two temperatures – freezing or scalding; the taps in the bathroom don’t have hot water (shaving with cold water – painful); the ‘clean’ towels supplied smell like cheese; the room is like a fucking ice-box because the heater doesn’t work; I don’t have a fridge for fresh milk; I don’t get breakfast (so it’s not so much a bed and breakfast as just a bed); the TV is a tiny portable affair with only 4 channels, all obviously being fed off one aerial and the signal split to every room, as the picture is so fuzzy it’s unwatchable; my room is right next to the front door so I hear the door slamming as people come and go all night; and brilliantly, the loud extractor fan in the bathroom, which stays on for 20 annoying minutes after you switch the light off, doesn’t even have a pipe on the back to guide the smell outside – it’s on the roof of the shower room, and after clambering on a dresser to see what was on top of the roof, I found that I could look down the back of the fan into the bathroom – it simply extracts out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, so that instead of your bathroom smelling of shit, your whole room does. To call this place a crap-hole would be an insult to the good name of crap-holes. It should be condemned. In fact it should be demolished. As I lie, shivering between my threadbare sheets, watching my fuzzy TV and inhaling the fumes of my own turds, how I long for a return to my tiny attic room with the scary taped up doors and the serial killer Chinese woman. Better to die quickly at the hands of a machete-wielding Oriental psychopath than slowly from the combination of germs and cold in this ball-sack of a hotel.
Song currently stuck in my head – “The Pieces Don’t Fit Anymore” by James Morrison.
dissolvoray@hotmail.co.uk
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