Hotels frighten me. I can only approach them armed with industrial-strength earplugs, a box of teabags, a jar of Marmite, an orthopaedic pillow, a towelling robe and slippers that fit, a large bag of apples, some bottles of mineral water, a scented candle and a DVD boxset of Columbo.
‘What the hell have you got in this case?’ asked a colleague as he helped me out of the taxi at the hotel where we were staying for the Tory conference in Manchester.
‘Too many outfits,’ I said. Because I really didn’t want to list the sad collection of home comforts I had packed in a bid to get myself through the next four days without throwing a tantrum at reception.
Why does it have to be this way? Why, in the era of great advancement in which we live, can a hotel not be constructed that allows for a night’s sleep, a nice cup of tea, a piece of toast and Marmite, and a bottle of mineral water that doesn’t cost £6. Of course, they offer you everything else. You can have a million complicated luxuries, from underwater shiatsu massage to every cable TV channel in Europe and a sound feed connecting them to the bathroom so you don’t miss the German version of Trisha as you’re brushing your teeth. But if you dare to ask for a bowl of fruit or a pair of curtains that meet in the middle a hotel will not take pity on you.
The more luxurious the establishment the more complex and baffling are the torments. Lying in my hotel bath in Brighton the week before at the Labour conference, for example, I suddenly realised there was something really odd about the water. I had turned it up to maximum and was attempting to boil myself into a nice state of oblivion. But oblivion came there none. I turned the tap backwards and forwards but could not produce anything other than perfect-temperature water. I was sitting in a ‘scald-proof tub’, the hotel literature explained. The water was of a scientifically worked-out hotness deemed safe by EU regulations. This is tragic for several reasons. A bath that can only be exactly the right temperature holds no allure for me. Once you get a bath precisely right there is absolutely no point to it at all. Like everything in life, the joy is all in the adjusting.
More importantly, I want the option left open to me to scald my own feet. I don’t want decisions safeguarding the tips of my toes taken in Brussels.
The bath isn’t the only thing under remote control in hotels these days. Have you noticed that the TVs now have no volume control? This is because we can no more be trusted to keep the television at a reasonable level on our own initiative than we can be left alone with a hot tap. It is presumably also for this reason that a hotel room is littered with procedural warnings and instructions. How to use the hair dryer, how to use the phone, how to use the bed — ‘Place self horizontal beneath covers and shut eyes. Warning: This item may induce sleep.’ And so on.
And then there are the endless lectures on the towels, about how you should consider yourself perfectly at liberty to pollute beautiful rivers and lakes by having them washed in detergent or be a decent human being and use dirty ones. It is, they make clear, your choice: ‘If you want to obliterate the environment please leave the towels on the floor so that we will know you are a selfish pig who cares nothing for the survival of the planet.’ I usually allow myself one change of towels in a week and am then plagued by a vision of the Avon bubbling over with Daz automatic.
Then there are the pally notes asking how you are feeling all the time. The note on your dinner tray which says: ‘Hope you enjoyed it!’ makes me want to leave a note on the reception desk saying: ‘Go away! Just leave me alone for five minutes!’
Worst of all, though, are the hermetically sealed windows. They induce blind panic in me. This is odd, because I never open the windows in my house at night. But put me in a room where the windows are nailed shut or have no handle at all and I become obsessed with the idea that I have to get them open. I wake on the hour every hour tormented by the terrifying finality of the closedness of the damn things.
Yes, indeed. A hotel room is a reclusive obsessive-compulsive control freak’s worst nightmare. I just want to get home so I can make myself miserable in peace.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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