HOTELS: A USER’S GUIDE

Travel

Torquil Arbuthnot recalls the days when one could billet at establishments that ranged from the highly suitable to the socially dangerous, and he presents a handy guide to each type of hotel accommodation

Sadly 2020 was a year mainly of Colditz-style internment, with very little opportunity to leave one’s abode for a well-earned holiday or even to flee one’s creditors. One can only fondly remember evenings spent in the Hotel Splendiferoso on the Cap d’Antibes or wet weekends in a B&B in Rhyl. But once the quarantine is lifted and the bucket-andspade retrieved from the pawnshop, the Chap will want to saunter forth on his summer hols. As there are many types of hotel and accommodation available, this is a short guide to hostelries for the discerning traveller.

THE SEASIDE B&B

The British seaside B&B is not known for its comfort but, like a Land Rover or a pork pie, does the job in an admirably no-nonsense fashion. True, the hot water will only be available for several minutes a day, there are a list of rules that would not be out of place in a German prison, and the management will steal the guests’ towels. But the bed will be comfortable and the breakfast magnificent.

Since any holiday to the British seaside is bound to be ‘rained off’, a Chap will find himself spending time in the Residents’ Lounge. This

The Seaside B&B

room will be dominated by a vast colour television perpetually tuned in to a documentary about meerkats. The bookshelves will contain sets of Mr. Alistair MacLean’s penny-shockers and Miss Georgette Heyer’s bodice-rippers. Although there are some board games in a cupboard, one will find oneself almost reaching the end of the game before realising that some vital piece is missing.

The other guests will include a company director and his ‘secretary’, a party of spelunkers from Burton-on-Trent, and a family which considers itself too posh for Butlins.

THE COUNTRY INN

Sadly the country inn is nowadays peopled by quacking lawyers, BBC producers and other riff-raff from London, all clothed via the Boden catalogue. The colourful locals in the public bar will play up to these interlopers, speaking rural dialects garnered from the popular televisual entertainment Poldark, and overcharging for botched work on their holiday cottages. But on the plus side there will be industrial-strength local cider on tap, and a shove ha’penny board in the corner. The inn will either be decorated with agricultural implements that look like instruments of medieval torture, or seafarers’ flotsam and jetsam. The food will be impressively solid, as will the gravy.

The bedroom will be up in the eaves and, instead of a welcome chocolate on the pillow, there will be a packet of pork scratchings. During the night one’s sleep will be disturbed by mysterious bumps and noises, possibly from smugglers evading the Revenue men.

The Country Inn

THE BOUTIQUE HOTEL

Everything in this establishment will be wincingly ironical or post-modernist, and the wallpaper will induce a headache. There will be ‘curated’ art on the walls, ie daubs by local art students. It will

The Boutique Hotel

be run by a self-styled ‘character’ who is about as colourful as Mr. Tim Henman. The hotel will proudly display photographs of talentless celebrities who have stayed, such as the gurning Dame Emma Thompson or some dementedly cheerful food-taster from a televisual cookery programme.

If one makes the mistake of dining in the hotel’s ‘bistro’ or ‘trattoria’, every under-cooked item on the menu will be described as ‘our famous...’ or ‘our signature...’ The waiters will be overly familiar and will try to tell you about their screenplay.

Some analogous item will be plonked in the middle of each bedroom (a blacksmith’s anvil, say, or a petrol pump) on which one can bark one’s ankles. The controls for the shower will look like something from Concorde’s dashboard, and will not work. Most of the clientele will be made up of wedding parties and hen parties, clogging the hotel bar with demands for sickly technicolour cocktails.

THE SEEDY HOTEL

The seedy hotel is usually located in a stagnant London suburb such as Bayswater or a somnolent resort town such as Budleigh Salterton. The hotel will smell faintly of damp and despair. The plumbing, like the wine at dinner, will be of uncertain vintage. The staff will appear to have been recruited from the local lunatic asylum.

Many of the hotel guests will actually be long-term residents, mainly elderly ladies who will pounce on new guests and insist on setting out the Tarot cards. Another resident will be ‘The Colonel’, whose regular table in the dining room is covered with an array of chutneys. Commercial travellers will make up the bulk of the transient guests, although there will be the occasional tattered barrister appearing at the local Assizes. Both will sport loud check suits and have an enviable repertoire of off-colour stories. Should one peruse the guest book, one will notice a preponderance of Smiths, as the hotel is popular for those couples requiring a dirty weekend.

The Seedy Hotel

FLÂNEUR

THE MEN’S FRAGRANCE FROM THE CHAP

The Swanky Foreign

Occasionally the hotel will appear in the Sunday newspapers, as one of the guests will turn out to be a naughty vicar, or a steamer-trunk in the left-luggage room will be found to contain the body parts of a showgirl.

THE SWANKY FOREIGN

The swanky foreign hotel is to be found in European capital cities, German spa towns and French casino resorts. The overheated rooms will be crammed with vast items of Louis XIV furniture but will lack a Corby trouser press.

Apart from the senile wealthy and the boorish Eurotrash, the guests will be an agreeable mixture of gentlemen cat burglars, Ruritanian femmes fatales, elegant card-sharps, sleek Argentine gigolos and mountebanks masquerading as Russian nobility.

The waiters are by turn supercilious and obsequious, depending on one’s bank balance, and the concierge is on a retainer from MI6. The bar will be called something like ‘The American’ and will claim that Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich regularly drank there. For a price, the head barman will provide anything from seats at the opera to Charlotte Rampling’s telephone number. Since the restaurant has not the faintest clue how to make a decent pot of oolong, a Chap will fuse the hotel’s lights by plugging in his 1970s teasmade.

THE FADED RELIC OF EMPIRE

These hotels may be found in the far-flung former colonies such as Kenya, Singapore and St. Lucia and are usually named after an unhinged Victorian general who once stayed there. The décor will be Home Counties Tropical circa 1950, with an excess of dusty chintz, bamboo and stuffed animal heads. Although air-conditioning has been installed, it is likely to be temperamental, and all bedrooms still contain vast mosquito nets. The staff will wear uniforms that make them look like extras from the 1935 film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and have deportment that would impress Jeeves.

Tiffin is served daily at 3 pip-emma, though the marmalade does not invite close inspection. The bar is the haunt of drink-sodden colonial types, mainly rubber-planters and big-game hunters. They will befriend hotel guests, mainly so they can cadge drinks and bore them with tales of the days when the natives knew their place. The house cocktail is nine parts Gordons Gin to one-part local aperitif made from the bark of the yim-yam tree.

The baize is threadbare on the table in the billiards room; however, on the plus side, an obscure variant of snooker (e.g. ‘Cumberland’s Light Horse Beezer-Slosh’) will have been invented at this table. n