Do not disturb! I’m trying to sleep through this show
LIKE most reasonable people, I hate buskers with a vengeance. I’d like to think there is a special place in Hell reserved for them.
Look, I am old enough to have heard Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, Fisherman’s Blues and Wonderwall rather more often than is good for a man’s mental equilibrium. No matter how bad it is coming across the original versions on the radio yet again, however, it is a million times worse when they’re being performed on the street by some spotty student with an out-oftune acoustic guitar.
Yet it is the exception that proves the rule, isn’t it? Only the other week I was walking up Grafton Street when I heard a chap playing a note-perfect version of The Harry Lime Theme, the haunting music from The Third Man.
Between ourselves, I was so impressed that I even fished into my pocket and threw over a handful of coins of the noncopper variety. I can’t remember the last time I did that. Nor, I’d imagine, can any of Dublin’s busking community.
Anyway, the upshot is that I’ve been thinking again about the film and its atmospheric setting in post-war Vienna. There is a famous scene where Harry (Orson Welles) is trying to convince his old friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) to join him in some nefarious activity. ‘You know what the fella said – in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,’ he says. ‘In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’
It’s hard to fault the logic, in fairness. Though I have never actually been to Switzerland, I have always worked on the basis that it is full of suits and is an even more boring place than Brussels. Which, as anyone who has ever been to the Belgian capital knows, would be quite some achievement.
Still, I like to keep an open mind in these matters. But nothing I saw on the visit by Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby to the Grand Resort Bad Ragaz – a destination in north-eastern Switzerland – did anything to change my mind. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It is located in a spa town that has been attracting visitors since the 13th century and, according to presenter Giles Coren, is ‘one of the world’s most exclusive health and wellness hotels’. The top rooms cost up to £10,000 a night.
Never mind the price, though, does the use of that word ‘wellness’ bug you as much as it does me? My reckoning is that a man capable of speaking like that is capable of anything.
Suffice to say that it all went downhill from there – and I don’t mean in terms of ski slopes.
We got some boring statistics about how the hotel employs 80 in-house medical staff to give dietary advice, carry out surgery and – interestingly – do sleep therapy.
It was at this point that we were introduced to Marco Zanolari, the hotel’s well-groomed but spectacularly dull general manager. ‘It’s much more than just a hotel,’ he assured us. ‘It’s a destination in itself, it’s a lifestyle.
‘The combination of medical, hospitality, sports, water are much more appealing to a lot of guests than just a hotel and a nice beach.’
I suspect Marco had plenty more to say for himself. But unfortunately I nodded off at this point and, by the time I woke up, the closing credits were starting to roll. Still, at least it shows that the sleep therapy works.