No matter how many scatter cushions they put on the beds, British hotels are just faking it. Thirty-five years after Basil Fawlty, we still can’t do hospitality. Oh, yes, we can do fancy little feedback forms and chocolates on the pillow. But we absolutely cannot do the basics. To visit a British hotel is to embark on a Ray Mears-style expedition into a hostile environment. Granted, it’s all very nicey-nicey down at reception, where the youngsters with gold lapel badges and tight waistcoats have got their degrees in Catering and Customer Care Technology from the University of East Grinstead and know a thing or two about raising your expectations — ‘You’ve been upgraded to a junior suite, Miss Kite,’ is just one of their cunning hope-raiser ploys. But as soon as you get through the door of your room, you are beset by a series of terrifying battles to acquire the basics to sustain life.
First, you will not be able to find the master light switch. And if you do find it, it will only turn on one or three lights, in places you don’t really want them, like next to the slightly stained occasional chair in the corner which you have no intention of visiting.
You run around the room flicking switches but none of them works or if they do they turn off the only lights you managed to get to come on a second ago.
Next, you realise there is a really loud noise, a hissing or growling coming from a huge cast-iron radiator that looks as if it was salvaged from the set of Downton Abbey. That will keep me up all night, you think. Then you realise that noise is not going to be the biggest challenge here. You’re sweating like an MP in a Turkish bath. There is only one temperature in British hotel rooms — 104° fahrenheit. The radiators are not adjustable. The windows are sealed shut to prevent you from committing suicide, which, let’s face it, you would. So you switch on the air con and that fuses the light by the occasional chair. In total darkness, and tearing off layers of clothes because you really are about to die of heat shock, you now fumble around for the telephone and call down to reception for help.
By the time they get to you, you are half-naked, crawling round the floor in your bra and knickers looking for the air-con remote which you’re sure you saw under the bed the last time the light flickered on for a second.
I always go to British hotels prepared for a struggle and with a huge sack of emergency equipment. Last week I took a bag full of mineral water and grapes to my hotel at the Labour conference in Manchester because when I visited this particular establishment previously it decided for some reason to withhold water and fruit from me, despite my begging for it every day most abjectly. So this time I stopped at the Co-op nearby to stock up on Highland Spring. But of course what I couldn’t stock up on was air and light.
After the frenzied search for a switch, I rang down and a young boy came to my room and, manfully averting his gaze from my semi-clad state, fumbled around in much the same way I had before happening upon a tiny hidden switch behind the headboard of the bed which operated all the main lights. ‘I’ve got it!’ he cried, as if he’d just sparked a flint, or caught a small rainforest creature with his bare hands that would suffice for a meal that evening. ‘Thank goodness!’ I said. ‘Phew!’ he said, wiping his brow. ‘Is there anything else?’ ‘You couldn’t turn that radiator off, could you?’ He fiddled, but to no avail. His ability to perform basic tasks was severely hampered by heat exhaustion. After he’d fled — I’d force hotel staff to live in the rooms, see how they like it — I tried the air con again. Big mistake. Five minutes after I turned it on, and at the precise moment I took off the last of my clothes to get in the bath, the lights went out again.
I rang reception. ‘I’ll come up,’ said a girl this time. The young boy was already on compassionate leave.
It was a long wait but when she did arrive she explained that I must not use the air con and the lights together. ‘Hum,’ I said. ‘That poses something of a problem. Because I want the room to be a bearable temperature, but I also want to be able to see.’ She looked at me blankly, so I added, ‘At the same time.’ In British hotels, you have to make these things clear.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph
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