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OK! Call me wet!
Hitchcock got it right......
Maybe I don’t get out enough, but I really enjoy checking into a new hotel room. Even a bad one frees me from having to dust, make beds, and generally agonise over the Titanic style debris field that my significant other tends to generate, wherever he goes.
There’s just one detail, though, that never fails to generate loathing , and even fear in me. The Shower. I promise you, its nothing to do with seeing Psycho three times– at least, I don’t think so.
I just don’t do hotel showers.
Don’t get me wrong. I have come across brilliant watery experiences, in the past, and emerged feeling pampered, relaxed, even loved (One even contained a little notice actually urging you to steal the little bottles of toiletries.) The downside is that this has only occurred on rare occasions, in places that have dealt my bank account scars which it bears to this day. It’s a lot to pay for getting wet, successfully.
The normal scenario is this. The cubicle – sometimes bearing suspicious accretions of mildew, is shoe horned into an already minimal room, in an optimistic attempt to satisfy the description “Full en-suite facilities”.
Its waterproof credentials are dubious. Your first experimental squirt with the showerhead creates a Niagra sized downfall, and the resulting tsunami slips the surly bonds of the tray, and lands on the carpet. Naively, you suppose that the addition of a fully-grown human will quell its eccentricities. In the madness of the moment, you have forgotten that King Canute had a similar idea. No matter how many curtains you pull, and screens you close, within seconds, the bedroom floor will have acquired the moisture content of the Somerset Levels and the couple in the room below will glare at you over breakfast.
The misery of your swampy carpet, of course, is nothing compared to the horror within the Shower of Doom. The controls are minimal enough to make an ipod look like the flight deck of a Jumbo Jet. This should make life easy. It doesn’t. Your first hopeful turn of the dial releases pure arctic meltwater. Teeth chattering, you attempt to reverse the process and find yourself in a nightmare replay of the terminal moments of a restaurant lobster.
By now, you are at once hot, cold, apprehensive and vaguely dizzy. It’s the same experience as flu, but less fun, as you don’t have an excuse to put your feet up, with a glass of whisky and a couple of aspirins. Never have the words of Freddie Mercury about being “Naked and far from home” resonated so vibrantly.
Of course, there is no way, this side of Hades that you are going to wash your hair. You have seen what they do to sides of pork to produce hairless scratchings. There was once a guy in a band – Take That, I think - who preached the idea that hair was much healthier without the pollution of water and shampoo. All of a sudden this strikes you as pure genius, and you decide to give the theory a whirl for the remainder of your stay.
Significant Other loftily informs me that I should learn to master such simple mechanisms, and leaves me to suffer. Personally. I just think he enjoys all the screaming and swearing.
In every other respect , the holiday is a howling success. The sun shines benevolently, the food is marvellous, the drink even more so, the couple in the room below eventually forgive me and the dog refrains, for a whole miraculous week, from vomiting on the carpet.
The three of us return home revived and refreshed. I head, swiftly, gratefully for the tub, and sink into an explosion of bubbles as high as my nose.
But I know, that as surely as spring follows winter, there will be another day when I sit at the computer, booking the next short break. I will see a pretty little seaside retreat that welcomes pets, has on-site parking , four poster beds, its own brewery, and an in house masseur that might actually be Johnny Depp. My finger will hover over the “Book now!” link, and then withdraw, in silent disappointment
“We can’t go there. It doesn’t have en-suite”.