The Good Life

Little ease

Pamela Vandyke Price

This being a season when one experiences a wish to get out of one's winter quarters, if only to postpone the duster-to-dirt confrontation indoors, it is inevitable that hotel guides should plump like turves upon the thresholds of the press. My mat being totally bare, I was about to begin rattling my quills, porcupine-like, when it dawned on me that of course the publishers of these guides are only being prudent in excluding me.

My notions as to what is necessary, much less desirable, in a hotel bedroom are so unlike those of the intrepid hotel inspectors, that I sometimes wonder whether I should be admitted to a hotel for human beings at all; the amenities of pens, baskets, or travellingboxes deemed fit for four-footed friends might often be more comfortable than those four-starred containers for homo sapiens listed in guides.

As an entire issue of this publication is not available for a detailed study of what the ideal hotel room should be like, I will deal solely with the bed. After all we spend so much of our life on this piece of furniture that it Is surely not unreasonable to expect that it should fulfil its purpose — to give the user rest? Yet the majority of hotel beds are in the nature of a challenge rather than an assuagement.

Some kind of back-to-the-womb wish (in addition to increased costs of bedroom footage) has produced a fashion for wee boxes of bedrooms, so that even in luxurious hotels space has to be broken down by way of tiny lobbies, minuscule corridors and gigantic built-in cupboards (like updated versions of the Mistletoe Bough chest or French farce furniture), all at the expense of the peaceful expanse that, for me, should surround my bed.

Then there is that loathly invention of our time-pressed epoch, the studio couch. In theory this is supposed to make it possible to use one's bedroom for business meetings, which, for reasons I do not understand but which are redolent of stealth and conspiranY, apparently cannot take place anywhere else, and which would be adversely affected by the presence of a bed. I don't understand this either, unless it is because, as most business meetings are incredibly dull and always too long, the bed might tempt everyone to a civilised snooze. But as a place of occasional repose the studio couch is an accursed thing. The chambermaid hides coverlets and zips pillows into fibrous-coated cushion covers. To attempt ta rest on the daytime version of this bed substitute is to know what t is like to recover from a nights debauch by awaking on the metropolitan railway.

I am even more outrageous in my wish for a bed of what I regard as a reasonable size. Since MY slumber ceased to be confined bY cot bars, I've always slept (with, brief intervals at school and college on which we need nat dwell) in a bed at least 3ft. 6in ln width, and, for the last twenty-five, years, in a true double bed. And why not? But the modern trend

to compel me to pass the night In a mean-sized single, whereon who may be plump but who am not either very tall or very wide, have to lie like a Crusader on a tomb, at intervals awaking because I am clinging on the brink, or have dashed myself against an adjacent wall.

The whole technique of sleeping in a narrow bed differs rudimen" tarily from the gracious repose of an ample one: in the sarcophagus type, you lever yourself up and heave yourself round, but in the real bed of rest, you roll, relaxed and refreshed, lulled by the exploration of coolness where You have not been sleeping, or sub" consciouslydelighted by some new posture, curled or uncurled. Spectator April 27, 1974 Yet who dare demand a double bed if she is a femme sole?

The implications beetle the brows of the most civilised concierge, for Whereas orgies on the floor,

billiard table or in the back rows of plane seats are quite respectable, there is something terribly not done' about the indulgence of the pathetically normal appetite for rest and sleep.

As for reading in bed, this is an appalling perversion. It must be, because hotels make it impossible. No bedside lamp is adequate for reading even large print, and it is either on the headboard, or a cunningly short flex at the bedside, so that the light is directed only under the pillow or onto the floor. Telephone directories, Gideon Bibles and wodges of Clothing have to be accumulated so as to elevate the thing (the deep-hued shade of which I have to remove so as to get more than !allow dip illumination), in order to get light upon the page. As for turning it off or on, this is

deliberately made difficult so as to discourage all but the stubbornest reader. Occasionally there is a switch adjacent to the amusinglyrnisnamed 'light,' but this tends to he ultra-sensitive, sometimes only

going off when betwixt and between stations, at others,

quiveLing into action should there he the dropping of a boot in the room above or the roaring of a

dustcart without. Usually one has to lean periously out of the bed and grope in the wainscotting for a switch, sometimes inadvertently PlUcking plug from socket. The most bizarre deterrent I ever encountered was in a Provincial hotel, where I cast about vainly for some time before I Could trace the source of the Power of the bedside glim. It seerned impossible that it could be five feet above the pillow, but no,

tne point was indeed aloft, a six

inch string depending from a rosette below the picture rail, a la

Speckled Band. Standing upon the sagging bed (it was that rubber °s, n, for which I care as little as I

uo for the mackintosh sheet of the Potentially incontinent), I was Unable to claw at this contem

P?rarY version of the couvre-feu. The tottering pile that supported AtIle lamp therefore had to be taken uoWn and re-erected on my pillow, When I was able to edge myself up against the wall on tiptoe, and, "„allY, to put out the light.

O I do not have the slightest Intention of criticising any hotel guide or one single hotel inspect3r. They like spending their 'lights in boxes, on coffin lids — and they don't read in bed.