Singular life
Home from home
Petronella Wyatt
That wasn't it from Morocco. Ever been to Tangier? There's a hotel there called the El Minzah. In Tangier's heyday every itinerant pleasure-seeker used to stay there, including Errol Flynn. I don't think they have changed the hotel since. The first room I was offered resembled the inside of an empty chocolate box, in light and tone, one in which the orange creams had been smudged around the lid in a sort of mon- strous cacophony. They proudly announced it as their best junior suite. No, I said all suiteness and spite. It smells of regurgitat- ed couscous.
There was much consternation at this. Oh, Madame, we have nothing else. I Pointed out that one of the managers had said, a mere five minutes before, that there were other rooms available. Or had he said brooms? Sarcasm was lost on these guys. Eventually, looking very dubious, they took me to one of those corridors that seems to be embedded in a distant time warp. You Could still make out the footprints in the dust. At the end of the corridor they opened a door and took me into a Swiss chalet.
Yup. Right bang in the middle of north- ern Africa and there was a Swiss chalet. The ceiling had been covered with faux wooden beams and the bed could have warmed six large-sized frauleins. The walls were adorned, if that's the word, with watercolours of men and women in Alpine skirts and lederhosen. The rationale behind this was hard to understand. But the hotel was evidently very proud of it. 'Is our best room,' they said. 'Mr Flynn like 'ees very much.'
It was evident that no one had been there since Mr Flynn's departure some decades before. When I opened the door of the mini bar it fell off its hinges with a sound like a cymbal being dropped into an empty well. As Francis Bacon almost said, an empty mini bar is worse than an ill- tuned cymbal. I turned to the safe. This was a long shot — as a safe. After a few short hours a man promised to bring up the missing part. He then lost it under the Swiss bed. Another man had to pull him out by his heels. Better was not to follow. That evening, when I rashly attempted to open the window on the mad principle that this is what windows should do, the pane fell out.
How like my own dear home life. The builders have moved into the garden to begin underpinning my house. First they removed the steps, which was a bit incon- siderate. Then they dug two large holes around the other exits. This made me feel a bit paranoid. It is like sitting in a mediaeval fort being assailed by Saracens. This fol- lows on the heels of a burglar having climbed over the gate and stolen two busts, of Pitt and Spencer Perceval. I don't know why people became so exercised when a female television presenter failed to identi- fy a character from Shakespeare. This country can never have produced a more literate kind of thief. I wonder what the market is like in stolen historical busts. `How much will you take for this head of Robert Peel?"0h, I dunno, mate, after than revisionist piece by Lord Blake what said Peel weren't such a hot tariff reformer, I figure we'd do better with that bust of Georgie Canning that came out of Lady Antonia's garden shed.'
Anyway, in the autumn I am moving into Claridge's. Call it a whim. Actually, the insurance company has to pay for alterna- tive accommodation and Claridge's strikes me as good an alternative as any. Why don't people live in hotels any more, instead of renting unattractive houses for themselves? I shall have Claridge's on top of my writing paper. I am thinking of tak- ing the dog and setting up in early eccentric retirement, a sort of impecunious person's Lady Hester Stanhope. When I move back into the house I shall get a bust of her for the burglars to steal. "Ere, that Lady 'ester, she knew a thing or two about deficit finance, all right.'
`Of course, if we have a fire drill it'll be chaos.'
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