This is the hotel from hell. The Wellington Hotel, Vincent Square, Victoria, London. I am in a room G2. I can tell because someone has pasted a rectangle of paper with the legend "G2" scrawled upon it. The exterior façade of the place is peeling - Victorian grace replaced by Elizabethan squalor.
The tiny leaded glass panes in one of the windows of G2 have come away in places from the lead, and wait patiently to crash and tinkle to the ground below. The single light comes from a bulkhead fitting in the centre of the ceiling of the type that used to be fitted to minesweepers, circa 1944. An electrical conduit pipe runs from it down one wall. You can rest your head on it as you lie on the bed, for there is no headboard.
The room reminds me of Fletcher's cell in "Porridge", but the walls are painted cream, rather than green. The plug chain in the sink in the corner is attached to no part of the sink. Some idler has made off with the caps for the taps, so you don't know which is hot and which is cold. You soon discover however, when you are scalded when you run your hand under the hot tap. Paradoxically, however, the showers in the grotty shower room along the passage, where you can catch fifteen distinct diseases just touching the shower-head, run permanently cold, so if you want to wash your hair or your extremities, you do so in the sink.
The carpet on the floor is of the cheapest needlecord and is dark brown in hue to attempt to disguise the stains in the same way as teenage girls disguise acne by trowelling on makeup. Just as certainly as it does with the teenage girls, so the carpet fails on all counts. The furniture is of the gimcrack variety, and would be rejected by a boot sale. The wardrobe door is secured by a hasp and staple, though the padlock is missing. One of the runners on the top desk drawer has collapsed and the drawer is jammed in place.
The towels smell as if they had been washed in vinegar. The bedsheets are the cheapest possible cotton/rayon mix, and the duvet seems to be constructed of some unidentifiable material akin to tarpaulin. The single green blanket has the texture of carborundum paste. The painted walls are gouged and chipped in many places, and the room looks like a hospital waiting room that has been designed by Albert Steptoe.
I have a view out of the leaded window - I can see the fire escape, littered with empty cigarette cartons, juice bottles, old newspapers and older rags, and plastic bags blown hither and thither. There are no tea-making facilities, no iron, no trouser-press, no mini-bar, no tiny shampoos, no bath gels, no headed stationery, nothing to make your stay in a hotel even moderately tenable. I'm surprised there isn't a chamber-pot so that you can slop out of a morning.
The cost of this extravaganza, including a continental breakfast comprising a couple of slices of spam on wholemeal bread that could only appear on a continental menu in somewhere like Albania, was £95.
I got my revenge - I left several chewed pieces of gum on the undersides of the furniture where they will lie undetected until the furniture collapses in piles of dust.
On a humid, drab day in England's capital, the Wellington Boot hotel precisely mirrors my mood of seedy despair and grim isolation.
