All hotel rooms are the same. Entry card holder just inside the door the door, a passage way with a bathroom to one side. The wifi is slow and complicated to access. I never turn on the television.
There’s always a suitcase stand. I stand my suitcase there. I hang my jacket in the wardrobe. I have iron-blindness. More times than not, I have called reception to have an iron dropped up, and there has been an iron in the wardrobe. I know where my iron is at home.
The bathrooms vary - gold taps, marble tiles, silver taps, white tiles. The consistency in the bathroom is that the shower control will be inventive. I once saw a t-shirt in a market, with the slogan: ‘You think you’re smart until you use someone else’s shower’. Regardless, all hotel bathrooms work better than my shower at home.
In other rooms in this hotel, people are having affairs, romantic mini-breaks. People are travelling for their last visit with their dying mother. Wealthy husbands thrown out by their wives are ordering room service cocktails. I’m a business traveller. I’m a background detail in these stories. I have no individual identity here, like one policeman in a riot squad, or a single dancer in a kick line.
It’s easy to feel lonely, travelling. But home isn’t a place. It’s not where you keep your tools or your pots and pans. Home is the people you love, wherever they are.
Home is a rushed burger before you both run to different trains. It’s under the striplighting of a curry house. Home is on a bridge across the Seine. Home is people.
Why limit your home to the place you keep your stuff? Although you do know how the shower works.
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