On-the-bed living

Staying at hotels for any longer perod of time is a little weird.

Your life is generally tits over arse anyway because you wouldn’t be doing that if you didn’t have to, but the lifestyle you adopt quickly becomes surreal. Someone else is making your bed, cooking your food, cleaning your room… Folding your towels, for christsakes.

Not the way I normally live. Not even on a good day.

Some places I’ve stayed have been … less comfortable than the one I’m at now. But this is one of those hotels that is not quite as nice as it thinks it is. It’s not bad, but it does have a rather high opinion of itself. And I find that I am less likely to behave in a rock’n'roll lifestyle way when everything is neat, clean and resonably priced… Or whatever.

The thing I find fascinating is that you develop a routine quite quickly. And yes, I know we do that to handle stress. And yes, I know that’s how the human brain functions – especially under duress. This is the first hotel I’ve stayed in for a while where you tend to live mostly on the bed. There are really no other comfortable areas. There’s a desk, but I have a thing about glass… Can’t really explain it. Every time Robert De Niro puts his gun down on the glass table in Heat the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. There’s a chair, but it’s just not inviting. There’s a fold away table… but no.

The bed is a queen, so that’s where I live, camping out like a very rock’n'roll tech noir gypsy, complete with cell phone, take away sushi and lap top.

Another reason I think this hotel isn’t everything it thinks it is, is that the room is down right cold. I’m not whiny about drafts and shit normally, and I would think I was imagining it all – still getting over a viral thing – but the curtains move in the breeze from the windows that are closed. So - tech noir gysy with the hood up on the bed eating sushi and shaking like a leaf. Not rock’n'roll at all.

And no hotel with any degree of self respect would pawn off the even more ridiculously watered down brown water served at breakfast as coffee. Please. They can serve all the scrambled eggs and tomato juice they like – if they can’t make a decent cup of Bull’s Blood I remain thoroughly unimpressed. And a just a little pissed off.

ROL

A nice hot cup of … brown water?

I get serious about my coffee. As far as stimulants go, it’s one of my all time favourites. Which is why I get so serious about it.

Normally I start the day off with one of those vicious little espresso-make-it-yourself things made from actual coffee grounds and actual water. Put on plate and boil. Wait for scent of freshly made coffee to waft through apartment. Pour and drink.

If it’s one of those mornings I’ll wait until it cools and then shot it.

Once you get to work you get the big pot boiling and then just keep it going all day. Coffee doesn’t give me an ulcer, it just mollifies me. Keeps me happy. Keeps me going. Because of the insomnia people sometimes assume I should be having herbal tea instead, but that’s not going to happen. I mean … tea? It might smell like orange/cinnamon/ginger but it always, without fail, tastes like straw. Old straw with bits in it. Straw that’s been trodden on by farmanimals, maybe.

So, for the past couple of days I’ve been staying in a hotel that has all the amenities. You can even get a little electric water boiler so you can make you own coffee in your room. And as I stand there pouring the powder of instant coffee into my cup I realise I’m fucked. This is so sad. They give you the boiler, the powder and the mug and smile.

Smug bastards.

That is not coffee. That’s what you give people who don’t understand about coffee. I have to pour three of those ridiculous little packets into the mug to even get it to show a little colour.

Coffee should be black, evil and have a serious attitude.

It should smell like coffee and look like tar. It should leave an impression in the mug and give the spoon a run for its money. It should laugh in the face of milk and scoff at lattes. It should not, and I can’t stress this enough, taste like straw.

But, hope springs eternal, so I figure I can get decent coffee at breakfast, right?

I look around when I get to the breakfast. Uh-oh. Not a coffee-pot in sight. No trace of any kind of container to keep nice coffee in.

What they do have is one of those machines. You know the ones. It might say “coffee” on the button, but when you press it you get brown water. Sad brown water, at that. And I look into the cup with dismay. I scan the table and find more instant powder stuff. I add a couple of spoons of that. It’s bad, but it could have been worse. People are giving me looks. I don’t care. I am not yet mollified.

Giving up on the hotel altogether I head for work.

They must have coffee, right?

I mean no office with any kind of desks, and people at the desks, and work going on, can not have coffee, right?

Another machine awaits.

This is one of those pretentious “every cup is freshly made” machines that had little pods that look like poker chips and come in shiny colours. Each colour signifies some exotic and special blend with aromatic features from the region where it was grown. It invariably tastes the same. Brown water. Stay away from the red ones. They’re decafinated. That in itself is a horrible concept, I mean why take the coffe out of the coffee and then have the gall to still call it coffee… Red being the natural warning colour I feel they at least made a smart move there. Stay away from the red ones.

I don’t get homesick. I don’t get bummed out by staying at a hotel and leaving my stuff behind. It’s just stuff. I don’t freak out by starting a new job, meeting new people, being dropped in a  city where I don’t belong and can’t find my way around.

But the coffee… The coffee… I miss my coffee.

ROL