THE LIMOUSINE MAN

I was in London on business last December when I met the limousine man for the first and last time in my life. The weather had been balmy and mild, though horribly wet. I booked a hotel using one of those last-minute bucket-shops on the internet. I secured a room in a hotel on the borders between Victoria and Pimlico. The hotel looked alright from the outside, a gently peeling Victorian pile, but inside it was a low-grade sewer. The single light emanated from a bulkhead fitting in the centre of the ceiling of the type that used to be fitted to minesweepers, circa 1944. An electrical conduit pipe ran from it down one wall. One could rest one’s head on it as one lay on the bed, for there was no headboard.
Some idler had made off with the caps for the taps, so I didn’t know which was hot and which was cold. I soon discovered however, when I was scalded when I ran my hand under the hot tap. Paradoxically, however, the showers in the disgusting shower room along the passage, where you can catch fifteen distinct diseases just touching the shower-head, ran permanently cold, so I had to wash my hair and my extremities in the sink.
The carpet on the floor was of the cheapest needlecord and was dark brown in hue, to attempt to disguise the stains in the same way as teenage girls disguise acne by trowelling on makeup. Just as certainly as it does with the teenage girls, so the carpet fails on all counts. The furniture was of the gimcrack variety, and would have been rejected by a boot sale. The wardrobe door was secured by a hasp and staple, though the padlock was missing. One of the runners on the top desk drawer has collapsed and the drawer is jammed in place.
The towels smelled as if they had been washed in vinegar. The bedsheets were the cheapest possible cotton/rayon mix, and the duvet seemed to be constructed from some unidentifiable material akin to tarpaulin. The single green blanket had the texture of carborundum paste. The painted walls were gouged and chipped in many places, and the room looked like a hospital waiting room designed by Albert Steptoe.
I had a view out of the leaded window – I could see the fire escape, littered with empty cigarette cartons, juice bottles, old newspapers and older rags, and plastic bags blown hither and thither. There were no tea-making facilities, no iron, no trouser-press, no mini-bar, no tiny shampoos, no bath gels, no headed stationery, nothing to make one’s stay in a hotel even moderately tenable. I was surprised there wasn’t a chamber-pot so that one could can slop out of a morning.
The cost of this extravaganza, including a continental breakfast comprising a couple of slices of spam on wholemeal bread that could only appear on a continental menu in somewhere like Albania, was £95. It was at that very breakfast that I met the limousine man. He was already seated in the communal dining-room. I sat opposite him at a table for four. There were no other vacant seats. All manner of foreigners occupied the rest. He blinked shyly behind rimless spectacles. He was not an attractive man. He was well into his fifties, and had the flaccid, unhealthy visage and pot belly of the dedicated beer drinker. His hair was short and tousled, but it had retained much of the sandy colour that had been there since childhood. He wore a Cardiff City replica football short, which looked a trifle incongruous with his middle-age, his blue jeans and his rimless glasses. He drove wedding limousines for a living and occupied the next fifty-five minutes of my life with a narrative of the most extraordinary dreariness that it threatened to cause me to explode with anger. Eventually, after I had driven up and down every road from Betws-y-Coedd to the Mumbles with him and visited every church in the Welsh Ministry, I took my leave. He shambled out to the hotel foyer after me, to regale me further, but I took to my heels and was halfway to Penge before he'd made the main gate.