In a land of the purple bed and other travelling tales

September 18, 2023, 11:04 am , by Richard Lutz

RICHARD LUTZ lays his head down in three different places as he travels through England

I’ve had it with long distance travel. I’ve had it with airports. Especially since our last airline decided it was appropriate to dump us in an unscheduled city with no way home.

Instead, we’ve been drifting by car through Britain. The last trip took us down England’s spine through the heart of the country. We stayed in a variety of places and, indeed, where you stay, what you view (or don’t view ) through a bedroom window or a kitchen door colours a visit.

First off was an Airbnb in Salisbury. I always feel that with Airbandb there’s something they don’t tell you. In Brooklyn, it was the bedroom in a basement so the first thing you saw when you flung open the curtains were people’s knees. In Seattle, it was a garage too small to park in. In Lisbon, we weren’t allowed to use the white towels. And then there was the place without a can opener.

In Salisbury, the landlord promised a ‘cathedral view’. We got a view alright, a view of an auction house car park and, in the back, a view of a drug rehab centre.

Yes, there were buckets of hot water but in the minuscule kitchen the dishwasher couldn’t fully open. There were two double bedrooms. But there weren’t four chairs in the living room to sit down together. The decor was simple if not bland and the walls were cross hatched with a maze of cheapo external plastic tracking for the wiring. I’d call the place Upmarket Bedsit. Clean, perfunctory and definitely don’t look too closely at the final product.

I could go on. It was international Airbnb-land. At times I didn’t know if I was in Britain, Europe, India, the US or Australia. But whichever continent I was in, I’d be sure to pay for those opaque administrative costs that never really explain themselves.

Even when you checkout, Airbandb never really leaves you alone …

Anyway, it got you out of the house fast to see the sights each morning. But even when you leave, Airbnb never really lets you alone. I’m now on my third day of constant chummy emails cajoling me to enter an ersatz community I don’t want to be part of: requests for me to comment on the joint with the carrot that if I do I can see what my ‘host’ thought of me (god forbid…). Airbnb you get what you pay for. And sometimes less.

Off to Shrewsbury. This time, the accommodation was an historic home. The Georgian townhouse had been in the same family for centuries, smack in the middle of the city. There was an intrinsic feel of Home-ness about it. Airbnd-land, it wasn’t. Dark oak lined the corridors, squeaky stairs led to the huge bedroom, the fireplace was marble.

Marble, in a bedroom….

It was British idiosyncrasy, years upon years of changes, of pulling down, of building up, of patching over.

The bathroom reached, in its own way, historic levels too. It was every bathroom an aged aunt had ever owned. There was a copious bathtub for the slow and noisy hot water feed, a funky handheld shower head that tended to have a mind of its own, jolly rural prints on the baby blue walls, frilly things on any flat surface.

Back in the huge bedroom with its China tea service, the television was at least 18 inches wide, sitting just below that marble fireplace.

From the windows, the view was a Jane Austen novel. A street was lined with a terrace of Georgian homes. The skyline was a jagged profile of peeked roofs and church spires. A glance in the back was of a walled garden including a pergola, borders of robust flowers, a finely kept 18thc summer house.

Here, there was a fading but warm comfortable air about the house; every inch of its 18thc decor was slightly fusty, old fashioned. Every footstep from fellow guests could be heard if not felt. And on the walls were portrait after portrait of unnamed owners down through the generations that captured a sense of family and place. Parking, always a nightmare in British cities, was a tight squeeze in a garage filled with canoes for jaunts down the Severn.

And, as opposed to the digi-world of Airbnb, leaving the Shrewsbury townhouse was cash or cheque. No plastic here. And who the heck carries chequebooks, anyway? Every corner of the house was decorated with the handprints of a family embedded in this part of genteel Shrewsbury, the grand old lady of Shropshire.

A world just off a roundabout

A final place: we dumped ourselves in a Premier Inn. They are dotted around the UK, usually in out of town commercial ghettoes cuddling between supermarkets and tool hire depots. Everything in every Premier Inn is identical. But the rock steady conformity, its standardised familiarity after a long journey (and extra miles added on after a GPS mistake) was a godsend down to its tiny bedroom desk too small to actually use, to the 50” tv at the end of the bed, to a restaurant offering unimaginative but digestible food.

This was another side of Britain with its ring after ring of roundabouts circling market towns, pop up cookie-cutter housing estates connected to nowhere and rush hour traffic trying to wedge in and out of communities better suited to a horse and carriage.

But it had a Premier Inn, all purple decor and next to the inevitable tool rental store in case of a sudden urge for a chainsaw. This was the staging post for Britain travelling; families with kayaks on car roofs; IT consultants en route to conferences; couples leaving very early to see aging parents.

The view from our Premier Inn was a world just off a roundabout. No history, no admin charges. No sense of place. But a great bed. A purple bed, in fact.