HOTEL DU BLACK

“I’m sorry, the lift isn’t working. The man’s gone for a part. He won’t be able to fix the lift until tomorrow.”
I could verify that there had been a man about the lift, for I had seen his white van emblazoned with the legend ‘Hopewell’s Lift Services’ drive away as I had entered.
“I couldn’t possibly climb up the stairs to the third floor. I’ve got a bad knee,” my wife speaking.
The female receptionist, stick-thin and peroxided, flicked through a pile of reservations.
“You’re only staying for one night. We could give you a family room on the first floor.”
“Has it got a view of the sea?”
“Believe me, it has a view of nothing else”, said the receptionist, drily.
“That would be perfect,” said my wife.
“Room 101”, said the receptionist, handing over the key. I sniggered at the irony. Room 101, in which Winston Smith was forced to confront his worst terrors, which included, as I recalled, O’Brien forcing Winston’s head into a basket containing several malevolent little rats. Feeling quite Orwellian in the context that I believed disaster lay just around the corner, I heaved the suitcases upstairs.
Most hotels nowadays have a card-holder into which one slips a plastic card to open the door. The Rex hotel employed doorknobs from B and Q and these opened with a traditional key and, from the way the key flopped about in the lock, quite possibly a hairgrip or paper-clip.
The room was large – four single beds were strung out, dormitory style, in a row.
‘St Trinian’s’, I thought. At the far end of the room, the Edwardian bay window gave out onto a flat roof supporting the floor below. Guests had amused themselves by throwing things from the rooms above onto this flat roof. I counted a number of cigarette ends, two crisp packets, several cotton buds and something indescribable that might once have been rolled-up toilet paper. However, the view from the window was spectacular. The sun was sinking in the west, giving the calm sea the aspect of a huge pellucid turquoise jelly. In the distance, marker buoys winked out their message, and at the head of a long causeway, stood a virgin-white lighthouse.
‘Nothing between here and Germany,” I said.
The room was less spectacular. The cod-Regency furniture was all MFI, and the striped wallpaper was peeling from the wall where damp had penetrated. The white paint had turned yellow in parts. Half the bulbs in the wall-lights didn’t work, and a knob was missing from the television cabinet. In the bathroom, the toilet seat wouldn’t stay up, the shower head was done up with sticky-tape and the temperature control knob had been stolen, meaning you couldn’t change the temperature of the water, unless you were crafty enough to have packed a cross-bladed screwdriver in your overnight case. I hadn’t. I took a shower later. The water was boiling, as if I were in one of those sulphurous hot springs in freezing-cold Iceland. The sticky tape was not up to its job, for the shower head kept slipping down to the horizontal, leaving me with soap in my eyes and no water.
“Where’s the remote?” I asked.
“There’s a ten-pound deposit if you want a remote.” I had to stand by the television pressing minuscule knobs, some of which altered the brightness, the volume, the contrast, but none seemed to change channels. I found out later that the channel-changer was also the on-off switch, which you had to press more heavily if you wanted to turn the TV on or off. Later, I watched ‘Edge of Darkness’, with Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker on BBC4, first viewed in 1985. Then, it had been exciting, scary, thought-provoking and thrilling, now it was simply incomprehensible. That’s the difference between watching it aged 34 and 64.
A notice read: ‘Since the rooms have been despoiled by guests bringing back curries, no curries are allowed in the rooms.” I wondered about the quality of the previous guests as well as the quality of the curries.
On the bedside table sat a well-thumbed book. It contained details of the top 100 so-called‘boutique’ hotels with their photographs. In other words, hotels paid a handsome sum of money for their details to be advertised in this way. Each of the hotels had a guest satisfaction rating. Most were in excess of 80% and one, in Sheringham, Norfolk, had achieved 99%. I wondered who the one disgruntled guest was – perhaps Alan Partridge. The Rex’s score was 57%, the lowest by almost 30%. Two of the single beds were bowed in the middle as if Daniel Lambert, Britain’s heaviest man at 52 stone, had been a regular sleeper there.
The next morning, quite early, we went down to breakfast. A Filipino girl was waiting on table.
“You sarve yarself sarials” she said. “Wha' wan’ cook breakfuss?”
We ordered full English breakfasts, without baked beans.
“Wha' egg you wan’?” she said “Sclempel or flied?”
I was incredulous. “Sclempel or flied?”
“Yay” she pointed angrily at the menu. I looked.
“Oh, scrambled or fried.” I said.
"What I say," she retorted, jabbing a finger at me "Sclempel or flied.".  I chose sclempel, my wife chose flied.
The waitress brought the meals when I was a third of the way through my cereal.
The hash brown was tepid and tasted of shoe-cream. The black pudding was the consistency of brick and had the texture of brick-dust in the mouth. The fried bread was inedible and looked like leather. Indeed, it might well have been leather, being brown and tough as old boots.
Even the tea had a tainted taste, as if the water had been drawn from an old pump in the back yard.
“It’s been a year since I last stayed in a hotel,” I said to my wife as we were leaving.
“So?”
“It’ll be another year before I stay in another one.”
“Have a nice day” said the relief receptionist as I handed in the key.
“I will now” I said.