Flights

HOME IS MY HOTEL

I look around and take each thing in again. I look at it from scratch, like I’ve never been here before. I discover details. I am particularly struck by the hotel owners’ attention to the flowers – they’re so big and pretty, with their luminous leaves, and their appropriately moist dirt, and that tetrastigma: impressive.

What a big bedroom, although the sheets could be better quality, white and well starched linen. Instead they’re the colour of faded bark, such that they require neither pressing nor ironing. The library downstairs, though, is actually terrific – it’s exactly the kind of stuff I like, and it has everything I would need if I ever had to live here. In fact, I may end up staying longer just because of those books.

And by some strange coincidence I find some clothes in the closet that fit me perfectly, mostly dark colours, which is what I like to wear. They fit me perfectly – that black hoodie, so soft and so comfortable. And – and this is now beginning to be truly incredible – there on the nightstand are my vitamins and the earplugs I always buy. This is really too much. I also like that you never see any of your hosts, that there is no housekeeping staff here in the mornings pounding down your door. That there isn’t anybody wandering around. There’s no reception. I even make my own coffee in the mornings myself, just the way I like it. On the espresso machine, with steamed milk.

Indeed, it is a good hotel with good rates, this one, perhaps a little bit in the middle of nowhere, and some distance from the main road, which in the winter gets buried in snow, but if one is travelling by car, it doesn’t really matter. You have to get off the motorway at the town of S. and go a few kilometres more along a regular road and then turn at G. onto a chestnut-lined avenue that leads to a gravel road. In the winter you have to leave your car by the last hydrant and walk the rest of the way.