A MERE NUMBER

Evening Star, Issue 21004, 19 January 1932, Page 2

A MERE NUMBER

HOTEL LIFE IN LONDON

Hotel life is all part of the mechanism /—nothing can 1 imagine more fitted than a London hotel to crush out individuality, and strangle at birth any impulse of originality (says a Glasgow writer). On entering, like a convict, one becomes a mere number—could anything be more significant of one’s insignificance? Everything goes by clockwork regularity—the lift conveys one up and down (unless one conceives an inexplicable longing to test tho feel of the red stair carpet); there is running water in one’s room as in hundreds of other similar rooms; there is a light above one’s bed, and a pink eiderdown —which, somehow, because it is an hotel quilt, is less benignant than it would otherwise appear; one’s window looks out on Model Houses for Families—oh, the sheer depression of their cemented courts and open landings, and faded geraniums! Downstairs, in the dining room, there is all the disorder of breakfast, the broken rolls, the tea-stained pots, the unedifying spectacle of waiters dragging tablecovers about the floor. (I wonder if a man can be a waiter and keep his self-repoct? It seems impossible!) And, perhaps most disturbing of .all, in hotel life, are these little telephone messengers, who interrupt the peace of the writing room, the restless hum of tho lounge with their “ 203, please,” “ 4 double nine, please.” With their Cockney accents, they are allcompelling. One simply must listen to them.