Hotel

Начало книги

Around this time, the time I did not spend in hotels was time I did not live. During this other time I haunted a marriage I was soon to leave. There’s no place like home and, as home seemed hardly to qualify as a place any more, I began to look for something elsewhere.

I got myself a job as a hotel reviewer for a startup website. There was lots of reviewing to be done. I reviewed grand hotels and boutique hotels, budget hotels and expensive hotels, city hotels (mostly) and country hotels (occasionally). In each hotel I stayed one night, two, three at most. If I planned carefully, I could live in hotels for weeks at a time without taking a break.

What did I look for in hotels? A home away from home? Perhaps.

Some of the hotels I visited were like the homes I had sometimes thought I might have wanted as a child: baronial backstories of hunting prints and tartan (carpets, walls, bedcovers, everything!). Some were Zen gardens of mushroom minimalism; others, boudoirs, where terrifyingly tall satin bed heads and velvet button-back chairs Alice’d me into submission. Some hotels wanted to be better than home: seamless, uplit concept spaces; entire rooms dipped in white rubber (a few scuff marks around the feet of the bed); corridors with no lights; walls that changed color at the flick of a switch; black toilet paper.

Читать дальше →