The Room Attendant

A hotel room is a lonely place. Indeed it is. To the lone traveller. Interesting (and disgusting too) to clean, though.

If you're interested, that is, in people's habits, yet disgusted by cleaning up after them, which can make you feel somewhat superior. Dirty Beasts! because well, you would think that wouldn't you? if you were forever changing soiled sheets, picking up debris from the carpets, mopping up spills, and coming across hairs of all types. Nobody likes cleaning the bathroom. I don't even like cleaning my own, and I'm the sole user.

My favourite task is vacuuming. As a little girl, I was given, I think by a great-aunt a toy vacuum, which I want to say was a beige colour and modelling itself as an Electrolux. I don't know if I'm right about the last detail but I seem to remember a tiny silver emblem bearing that name. Unless I'm confusing it with my grandparents' full-grown upright model. Anyhow, it wasn't a Dyson and it certainly wasn't a Henry. The latter, by the way, I have a great dislike for, but lots of hotels (God knows why – and maybe he does) swear by them.

That same great-aunt also gave me, I believe, a toy stove and washing machine. I don't believe I'm making this up, but maybe I am? Memory is a funny thing. But now I think about it I also seem to recall tiny pieces of silver cutlery, not real silver, mind, just shiny plastic. I loved all those mini-household appliances, playing with them, but you do when small, when the adult world is inaccessible.

Until you get there and realise the labour behind them. I still enjoy vacuuming though, if it's an upright model and not one that has to be yanked along on its wheels. Come on Henry, heel. There's a good boy.

Bed-changing, I don't mind either. There's something quite satisfying about pulling a dirty sheet off and putting a fresh, crisp one on, though I do, at times, wish large hotel chains would invest in elasticated sheets. I'm tired (and bored) of hospital corners. Laundry wouldn't be able to cope, I suppose, because flat sheets are so much easier to press and fold.

I did a couple of days in the pressing room once, for guests' clothes. It was hot and uncomfortable. And there was a laundered steam smell. Hard to describe, really, but that type of steam does have a smell. Nothing overpowering or floral, just, well, clean. The air was as humid and moist as the hothouse at Kew Gardens, causing my hair to turn to frizz and my face to melt. The supervisor I had to report to was creepy. He gave these funny little smirks and I'm sure he had unsavoury thoughts. About me. It was a relief to get out of there and return to attending rooms, on my own with my trolley and a smiley Henry.

Best of all, I like checking rooms. You could say it's my party piece. I walk into a serviced room, mine or one of my fellow attendants, and pretend to be a floor supervisor. I run a finger along skirting boards and tops of cupboards, examine it and tut. Then I check the bed is made correctly with the crease down the middle, frowning and making little adjustments here and there. I count the sugars, milks, coffees and teas and mutter profusely; I point out smears on mirrors and shower doors; I wrinkle my nose at toilet seats and inspect the shampoos and soaps. I make a pantomime of it basically and make myself and the girls laugh.

Such moments are rare, though, in this line of work, especially when the Head Housekeeper, as she is here, is a little like Miss Trunchbull, you know, the school headmistress in Matilda. Mind you, I will say this for her, everyone gets treated the same, even on occasion the guests. But for all that, it's not a bad place.

And there are perks to this job, although maybe you might not think of them as such, for instance subsidized meals on duty, tips should any be left but most guests are tight-fisted these days, lost property if unclaimed, and discounts off holidays.

I've checked in, as a resident, to a sister hotel once in my life and hated the experience. Not the room, the room itself was a bit old-fashioned for my taste but clean, but being in a city very different to my own, and alone. Because God, can a hotel room be a lonely place then.

Picture credit: French Maid, Banksy (source: WikiArt)

This article was penned during 2019.

Eleven Years

Last Wednesday, I celebrated an anniversary. Well, when I say celebrated what I really mean is that it was noted as it is every year in the diary. I did nothing in the way of marking it, other than to think upon it and perhaps I remarked on it to one or two people. It was really nothing special, not a birthday or a wedding. Nor anything sad, like so many years since someone loved had passed. They don't make cards for it. Nor am I suggesting that they should begin to. There are too many cards for too many occasions, for friends, couples and family members. A day for this, a day for that, and a card specifically for. All I get is my birthday. Oh, and Christmas, though less and less people mark that with the giving of cards. I'm one of them. Well, which is to say I only give them to a select few. The rest get email greetings or a text.

Christmas is overrated in my view. And I'm a December baby.

But we're not talking Christmas, we're talking anniversaries, or we were at any rate before I went off piste. Oh, I wish I hadn't used that word because now I want to mention skiing, specifically a dry slope run I once did where my skis got all tangled up in the netting. That outing was not my idea of fun, though I think that had less to do with the fact that the setting was fake and more to do with the fact that I didn't take to it. When you've always felt your feet were somewhat large – too long and too narrow – then putting on skis reinforces that complex, especially when you've entered, or are about to, the throes of puberty. If they'd put me in a sleigh with a driver and a pack of huskies I'd have been happier. Hey, I might even have whooped with delight if any bends had been taken fast. But I don't imagine you can replicate that in a country that gets little snowfall.

Yes, I know, I've done it again; huskies have absolutely nothing to do with the passing of time and the marking of it, but have you ever noticed what incredible eyes they have? Just saying...because maybe the wolf in Red Riding Hood wasn't a wolf at all but an Eskimo dog? Those eyes are mesmerising, and I'm sure they'd survive just as well in a forest. Angela Carter, if she were still here, would have something to say about that.

She's been gone a lot longer than eleven years (she died in '92), yet she still has new words to say to me. Richard Yates found eleven kinds of loneliness, which I haven't found with him yet though I keep meaning to. And I've passed eleven years, a week and a day in the one place. Well, to be precise, I've been in the area all my life, but eleven years in this flat. Sorry, apartment. I don't want to bring the tone down. It doesn't seem possible, but it is. It's happened. And never once during this time have I known my neighbours, not those next door or those on the opposite side of the corridor, or those above or below or in my core, or anyone in the other three, which interlock and form the whole apartment block.

Now, don't go assuming it's me. That I'm unneighbourly. No, I'm just one of a handful of owners that actually live here. The vast majority are rented out or are short-term lets, serviced and used by travellers – on business and for leisure purposes - which is surprising given the area, though we are in good commuting distance of London and all its attractions. The two on my corridor are just that. I've never known, for sure, from one week to the next whom I'm living alongside. One week it's a beefy man and the next a petite and sweet-looking woman. But mostly it's rare to see anybody, anywhere in the building, not in the lift and not on the stairs. It's all just row upon row of blank wooden doors, each with a single lidless eye that stares.

Yet, it's been as I said eleven years. And to which I still think: How has that happened? And where the only person I know to speak to is the cleaner of the communal parts and a very nice girl who services the apartment next door. Visitors, should a chance encounter arise, are visibly taken aback if I say I've lived here for as long as I have, for there's this belief that it's for the transient, only. People on the move or those saving to buy. I've therefore made what some think the equivalent of a hotel my home. Except that in this spot, from 1929-1960, there was a cinema. So that's where I've been for the last eleven years: at the picture house. 

Picture credit: The Capitol Cinema (source: Epsom & Ewell History Explorer).

Mrs. Brown

Have I spoken before of Mrs. Brown? Well, I'm about to right now speak of her again, so if you've heard of her, and are tired of hearing of her, I'd shut your eyes and ears. Go and make a cup of tea. By the time the water's boiled, a mug's been found, the tea bag dunked and milk added to your liking, Mrs. Brown will have done with her shopping and will once again be at home, safe and sound, in her slippered feet and cosy cardigan.

The shopping, however, if this is still one of her forgetful days, will have been abandoned, either in bags on the kitchen floor, or somewhere else. The hallway, the stairs, in or outside the porch, by the back door if she's come in that way, or even in the shop she made the purchases from.

But if you still don't want to join her even after she's forgotten or abandoned her shopping, then make yourself a sandwich, not I suggest in her kitchen because you won't find items where you'd think they'd be – there was a remote control in the fridge the other day – and so it might take you an hour or two just to find the bread and butter. Though, if you look in the cupboard above the toaster you'll find she has plenty of tinned food, soup and peaches in juice mostly, which put together as a starter and an after makes a good square meal, that's what she would say. On a good day.

Have you grasped some impression of her yet? This remarkable Mrs. Brown.

How to describe her...? Well, I can tell you what she's not like. She's absolutely nothing like, in appearance or manner, and in no way related to Agnes Browne, which you'll know if you know her that the 'e' was later dropped, which means this Agnes is not a Brown at all. A Brown as in coming from a branch of Browns without an 'e'.

And nor is my Mrs. Brown Irish. I'm not really sure what part of England she hails from; her accent gives nothing away.

On a good day, Mrs. Brown, my Mrs. Brown speaks clearly but softly with perfectly articulated vowels; on a middling one, she breaks off mid-sentence and is unable to finish off stories: I know plenty of beginnings and middles but few endings, and on a bad day she's more muddled, which quite often means she runs through a list of names until she settles on what she thinks is yours and expects you to answer to it. Although it might change during the course of conversation: you might be Harriet (one of her sisters) one minute and then you might be Rupert (her son, I think, or perhaps a dog?) the next. She has this look she gives you which suggests she's exhausted her mind and is exasperated (with herself) at the same time. She doesn't actually think you're that person (or dog); she just wants to hang a name, any name, on you, that's all.

This isn't a good day, so she can't tell me to tell you that she was around well before Agnes Browne, before Agnes was even a twinkle in her daddy's eye and later married off to a Mr. Browne; and that she likes to think she takes after Joan Hickson in the role of Miss. Marple. They also share the initial J. - hers is for Josephine. And indeed, she does have a look of her, facially. Build, too, and she wears her hair the same way, although it doesn't always stay there. It's cream-white and finer, more flyaway. A bit like her, really. On a middling day.

On a very bad day, she's more than absent-minded. Not so much as in regards to her person – there might be a food stain on a blouse or jumper – but more in what she says or does. That, she would tell you, on a good day, is because like Miss. Marple she was piecing together clues. Though clues to what she's always vague upon. A missing cat? A stolen bike? No, she says firmly, she's won't elaborate; a good sleuth never reveals her sources.

It's a mystery what goes on up there, in that brain of hers. And so that's why you'll find she might leave her purchases behind, or forget what she's done with her shopping and even whether she's done it; or perishables that should be in the fridge rotting in cupboards, or a wristwatch in the butter dish, with the butter.

Picture credit: Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.

All posts published this year were penned in 2019.