Dread and breakfast that could drive you to drink
IN an ideal world, hotels would be like the ones in movies. If you’re in London, there would be a view of the Thames. In Edinburgh, the castle is right there under your window.
In films, every hotel is next door to a major landmark. My hotel rooms overlook car parks, power stations or tramps having a latenight sing-song in a back alley.
Hotel booking seems to be a knack that I do not have. I read the reviews, check the pictures online, put through my credit card details and hey presto: a few days later I am in Hounslow, being shown a windowless room clearly just a cupboard big enough to house a mattress.
When it comes to Dread and Breakfast, my worst hotels are usually in London, booked by me online in haste and then repented at leisure in an outpost of Victoria or Paddington. There was the ‘friendly home-from-home’ where showering involved a furtive patter down the corridor in the morning, a fruitless five minutes under a showerhead that made saliva seem refreshing, and the realisation that all sleepy, shock-headed bathroom visitors were being watched impassively by the diners in the open plan breakfast room at the other end of the hall.
AT the opposite end of the hot-and-cold running water spectrum, friends who had planned a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Thailand, arrived to find that their hotel had been flooded.
Rather than offer alternative accommodation, the hotel relocated them to a room above the flood levels, and despatched a small boy in a rowing boat to ferry them to and from breakfast
This pales in comparisons to horror stories attributed to booking with Airbnb, where guests complain of bedbugs, scams and a decomposing corpse in the garden. How ironic that just when it became possible to visit interesting places and warm-hearted people by logging on and clicking the Book Now button, the process of travelling has become such a series of bear traps for the blithe, the optimistic and the unwary.
But not if you were the late Joan Rivers, who insisted on only staying in six-star hotels and, despite living in a New York apartment that would have had King Midas swooning with envy, delighted in taking as much of the accommodation home with her as possible.
STV’s Grant Lauchlan interviewed her shortly before she died and she took such a shine to him that she insisted he stay on and help her pack up the room.
Shower hats, beauty products but also bathrobes, magazines, shoe polish kits and slippers were all stripped out. The entire contents of her minibar went into another bag, which was pressed upon Grant as a gift.
He declined politely but Joan insisted. Which is how Grant guiltily came to depart one of London’s poshest hotels while America’s most famous fast-talking comedienne failed to drown out the guilty clank of champagne, whisky and wine bottles.
Turning STV’s entertainment correspondent into her booze mule is an even more remarkable tribute to Joan’s Force Ten persuasive powers, given that Mr Lauchlan is a lifelong teetotaller.