Old Gits and Haunted Hotels

1.       Oxo cubes

Among other things, I received several books for Christmas 2022. I will just mention two of them. One was Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, by Sebastian Faulks, a complete Jeeves and Wooster novel in as close to the style of PG Wodehouse as Faulks could manage. I have to say, he did a terrific job. I can see the joins here and there, and I think no-one could match the narrative wit of Plum, but Faulks got very close indeed. The book is very funny, an excellent read. And it brings us to a sort of closure, although I won’t tell you how. No spoilers. You’ll have to read it.

Another was Notes from the Sofa, a collection of the late Raymond Briggs’ pieces for The Oldie. I was slightly perturbed to note that there are some similarities between these articles and my blogs of 2021. There is certainly the same harking back to lost worlds of the twentieth century, and confusion with some of the technologies and inanities of the twenty-first. Briggs is most famous for his graphic novel, The Snowman, although the one that my kids liked best was The Man, a cartoon story of a four-inch homunculus with very traditional tastes (Mother’s Pride sliced white, full cream Jersey Milk etc) who invades the life of a small boy living in a very middle-class, organic, environmentally conscious household.

Anyway, Briggs’ Oldie articles are funny and endearing. I was particularly taken by one, The Magic of Old Ads, which includes a quote from an old magazine advertisement for Oxo Cubes: ‘OXO WORKS WONDERS. JUST ADD WATER FOR A TASTY BEEFY DRINK’. Briggs follows this with one of the funniest written dismissals I have read, ‘Well, thank you. I’ll think about it…’ I wish I had written that.

Incidentally, I did drink the Oxo-hot water concoction quite frequently in my childhood. It was the beverage of choice after a swim at the Carnegie Baths, Dunfermline, and actually was quite a warming drink after a swim. It tasted as if there was nothing in it that was good for you. Result. I also sometimes had a cup of it at football matches at Central Park (Cowdenbeath, not New York City).

For those of you who don’t know, there is a building in London, right on the Thames, called the Oxo Tower. On the Tower at night, one can see the word ‘OXO’, vertically, in lights. Apparently, the company were forbidden permission to erect an illuminated advertisement, but got round the prohibition by simply having windows in the building which spelled out the name. This reminds me that I once saw a scurrilous double entendre in a newspaper about a chap whose partner wanted him to take her up the Oxo Tower. A dirty mind is a perpetual feast.



2.      Haunted Hotels

I have sounded off about the ghost stories of MR James in previous blogs, mentioning two of his most frightening, Rats and Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad. Both of these take place in hotels in the east of England, with brooding skies over grey seas forming the backdrop to the protagonists’ encounters with malign spirits. Several others of his stories have hotels as their setting, notably my favourite, the one which epitomises Monty’s mixture of cosy and creepy, Number 13. In this story, the hero, Mr Anderson, is staying in a very traditional hotel in Viborg, Denmark, around the end of the nineteenth century. He is staying in room 12, and notes that next door on the corridor is room 14. There is no number 13. But in the evenings, every so often, room 13 comes into being, as a single compartment in Hell for a sinister cleric of reformation days. This sounds like strong stuff, but the lightness of touch, the comic landlord and the buttoned-up lawyer who occupies number 14, all give it the cosy ingredient of the mixture.

When our older son Bill was six months old, we had a holiday in the Headland Hotel, Newquay in Cornwall. This was where the 1990 movie of Roald Dahl’s The Witches was filmed. I suspect that it has since been renovated and looks very different, but in 1994 it was rather sinister. As one approached in the car, it looked like Manderley or the House of Usher. Inside, it was stranger still. We were staying on the fourth floor at the far end of the hotel from the reception, restaurant and other populous areas. The bar, ramshackle, but with the most amazing array of malt whiskies, was at the same lonely end of the building on the ground floor. Once we had got Bill to sleep, I would go down the four flights of stairs in the cavernous stairwell at our end of the building and get a port for Madam and a whisky for myself. The landings were deserted apart from huge sofas and sideboards. I found the journey back upstairs quite unnerving. I was reminded of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining. Later, describing this to a pal of ours, Jill Piggott, she made a very perceptive remark: ‘Sounds like one of the places Scooby-Doo and his pals might roll up at in the Mystery Machine.’

The first night we had to ourselves after Bill was born was courtesy of Linda’s sister Margaret, ever there for our boys. She looked after Bill and we went to stay for a night at Seckford Hall, a hotel in a magnificent Tudor house just outside Woodbridge in Suffolk. A colleague with more experience of parenthood than us said, the guilt will vanish when you are half an hour away from Cambridge, and he was right. Although free of ghosts as far as I can tell, Seckford Hall has period atmosphere in spades, from the Tudor brick chimneys outside to the low roof beams and unsettling paintings on the wall inside. Go there if you get the chance. It is expensive but there are the occasional special offers.

Although less frequently than before the pandemic, I often have to leave town for my work and stay in a hotel. On these occasions, my last-thing-at-night ritual is to buy a beer at the bar and take it up to my room as a nightcap. As I return to my room, the unease sets in. I come out of the lift and the corridor stretches ahead, with door after door on either side. There is no sound other than my footsteps and my breathing. We are passing room 515 and mine is room 577. More than thirty doors to pass on each side, two by two. Who or what could come out of one at any moment?

 


 

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