Room with a view

It may not be a home from home but for novelist Douglas Kennedy the relentless monotony of living in an airport hotel gives him the persective that he's looking for; That's when I had a brainstorm. Outside a motorway Travelodge, there is nowhere so visually antiseptic and deodorised as an airport hotelCheating on your spouse can be accomplished with far less stress in the neutral confines of a hotel room

In the spring of 1993, I was trying to finish my first novel - and not succeeding. The novel was called The Dead Heart, a nightmare story set in the Australian Outback. Though I had already published three narrative travel books, this was my first foray into fiction - which meant that I was writing the novel speculatively (ie, without a publisher's advance). In turn, this also meant that I was paying the rent by picking up a large number of freelance writing gigs - and never saying no whenever an editor called to commission a review or a feature.

Naturally enough, all these writing assignments severely limited the time I could work on the novel. Though I had already punched out 45,000 words of a 70,000 word manuscript, I was becoming deeply frustrated by the fact that I didn't have enough time to finish the damn book. Much to the boredom of my wife and friends, I started engaging in the usual writerly whinges about journalism being the great "enemy of promise" - a dreary lament that has been spouted by scribblers ever since Grub Street was invented.

Then there was the matter of my infant son, Max. He was just eight months old at the time - and, like most babies at that age, he was a dedicated sleep terrorist. Every four hours, he would issue a wake-up call, demanding his bottle, his misplaced dummy, or a clean nappy. Occasionally he would sleep through the night - and his mother and I would wake up in the morning, glowing with the sort of salvation one usually associates with Born Again Christians. Most of the time, however, we looked like zombies - and my brain was feeling as soft and perforated as a chunk of week-old Emmenthal cheese. In short, drastic measures were needed if I was to ever finish this bloody novel (especially as my wife - a film sales agent - was heading off to the Cannes Film Festival in a few weeks time). I needed to sequester myself in a place where I would be free of disturbance or distraction.

Yes, I could have gone to one of those writer's retreats - but, from my limited experience of these institutions, they become an excuse to drink into the night and/or engage in the usual internecine gossip that always prevails when you leave a bunch of writers alone together in a room. I needed a Writer-Free Zone, a place where I would think of nothing but the need to punch out 10 pages a day.

In other words, I needed to lock myself in a hotel room. But I also knew that the hotel in question couldn't be in a city because of all the usual temptations of urban life. I mean, who in their right mind would go to Paris to finish a novel when the whole point of Paris is loitering without intent in cafes, squandering afternoons at the cinema, and talking crap until 4am while propping up a zinc bar. Nor, for that matter, did I want to vanish to some vertiginous Alpine hamlet or a weather-beaten cottage on the Maine coast because I knew I would end up spending most of the day admiring the view or, worst yet, doing something healthy like walking.

In short, I was looking for a supremely boring, sterile environment - a place so dull that I would have no choice but to spend 12 hours a day hunched over my laptop. That's when I had a brainstorm. I would check into an airport hotel. Because, outside a motorway Travelodge, there is nowhere so visually antiseptic and deodorised as an airport hotel.

After speaking with bemused reservation agents at Heathrow and Gatwick ("You really want to stay with us for eight days?", one of them asked, aghast), I negotiated a deal at the Forte Crest, Gatwick. Two days later, I checked in. My room was quadruple-glazed, but afforded me a scenic view of a car park (and if I craned my neck, I could actually see a corner of the runway). There was a queen-sized bed, a small desk, a bathroom - all decorated in that bleached wood/neutral pastel tones style which could best be described as International Anywhere.

I had breakfast delivered every morning at eight. I worked until one. While Housekeeping tidied up my room, I'd venture into North Terminal for a sandwich and the morning papers. I was back in the room by two. I wrote steadily until seven. I spent an hour doing laps in the hotel's small pool. Thereafter followed my culinary treat of the day: a journey over to the South Terminal for dinner at Garfunkel's - after which I'd retreat back to the room for one final burst at the word processor before sleep finally delivered its sucker punch around one am.

I maintained this ascetic schedule for eight very long days - never once succumbing to the bright lights of Crawley, while also manfully resisting the epicurean temptations of the nearby Little Chef on the A23. At the end of this marathon, I rang my wife at our flat in south London and asked her to pick me up at Clapham Junction. As I came off the train, she said: "You look like shit."

Not exactly the most romantic of salutations but an accurate one. Because, after eight indoor days in the Forte Crest, Gatwick, I did appear bloated, pasty, sallow. But, at least, there was the completed manuscript of my first novel in my duffel bag.

Since finishing The Dead Heart in the late spring of '93, I have gone on to publish two further novels - The Big Picture and The Job. I am currently in the middle of Novel Number Four, which I hope to finish this summer. On average, a book for me is an 18-month project during the course of which I now spend around three months sequestered in assorted hotels around the planet. Because - as I discovered six years ago in scenic Gatwick - a hotel is the perfect place to work without distraction.

You see, hotels are emergency exits from life. They are places that afford you the opportunity to slam the door on the jumbled disorder of your day- to-day existence. Once you check in, you can shut out the pressures of family life, and forget the simple drudgery of domestic chores. You suddenly exist in a world where you do not have to buy groceries or change the bed linen. You can hang a Do Not Disturb sign on your door handle. You can ask the hotel operator to block all calls to your room. You can vanish from view. Suddenly, your time is your own. You do not have to adhere to anyone else's schedule. If you want to sleep until two in the afternoon, no one's going to stop you. Food and drink are brought to you when you want it. The hotel's concierge exists to deal with a broad cavalcade of human whims. Need a new pair of socks, a copy of Roget's Thesaurus, the services of a chiropractor. Pick up the phone - and the service will usually be forthcoming. As long as you can foot the bill.

More tellingly, there is something wonderfully transient about hotel life. The Victorian essayist and travel writer, Edward Verrall Lucas, got it right when he noted in his book, Wanderings and Diversions: "People in hotels strike no roots. The French phrase for chronic hotel guests even says so: they are called dwellers sur la branche."

In 1985, I had direct experience of this rootless hotel life when I lived in Cairo, researching a book that would become Beyond the Pyramids. My base of operations was the Pension Roma on Mohammed Farid Street - a very cheap, yet surprisingly clean establishment run by a tough, no-nonsense Coptic Egyptian woman who tolerated her rag-tag assortment of guests as long as bills were paid on time, and basic standards of personal hygiene and decorum weren't breached. The place was pure Olivia Manning. The lounge was filled with threadbare chintz sofas and sagging Edwardian armchairs. There were ceiling fans, and an old black-and-white television with an oval-shaped picture tube, and yellowing wallpaper. My room was a genteel junk-shop, filled with curiosities. Like a pair of wooden thrones in Ming dynasty style. And a Victorian table pockmarked by cigarette burns.

But the most intriguing feature of the Pension Roma was its supporting cast of permanent guests. There was Soraya - a sixtysomething American woman of Egyptian extraction who always wore black stretch pants and a leopard-skin-print blouse. She was a long-term expat - a one-time teacher of English who (for reasons she didn't want to go into) had given up her comfortable flat and moved into a single room in a four quid a night hotel. Then there was Mr Hussainy - another Pension Roma lifer: an elderly man who sat all day in the lounge, in a faded silk bathrobe and striped pyjamas, smoking Cleopatras, working his way through Anwar Sadat's autobiography (it must have been slow going, as he was still reading it nine weeks after I checked in). There was also a civil servant named Mr Alwan, who always seemed to dress like Des O'Connor and had this habit of repeating the same stories over and over again (I heard about his Irish holiday at least six times). And then there was the cheerful refugee from Eritrea who was stuck in Cairo while waiting for some western government to grant him asylum, and passed the time walking around the hotel with only a towel wrapped around his waist.

It was a deeply quirky community - yet one without any proper social cohesion or common antecedents. Because, being a hotel, it was a place of comings-and-goings. And even the so-called lifers of the Pension Roma knew that, at any moment, any time, they were free to check out.

Of course, most of us are not free to check out of our lives. We have families. We have dependants. We have mortgages. We have bills that must be paid. We have work that must be successfully accomplished in order to me meet the bills that must be paid. We have friends and neighbours and work colleagues who know us. Not only are we are rooted to one spot, we are never really anonymous.

No wonder, therefore, that hotels have such an ongoing romantic allure. Because they are places where displacement is a virtue, where temporary anonymity still exists, and where it is possible to walk out the door and never come back ... an ability that most of us surrender a few years into adult life.

Of course, hotel living was much more of a commonplace experience during the first 60 years of this century - when the corporatisation of hotel chains had yet to take place. Expatriate writers in Twenties Paris always seemed to hole up in some cheap, small pension near the Boulevard St Germain. Junked-upped jazz musicians inevitably lived in sleaze palaces like the Hotel Dixie in the Broadway district of Manhattan: a dump graced by the likes of Charlie Parker. Leaf through the collected works of Damon Runyon, and you will note that most of his Times Square characters resided in dubious residential hotels. Work your way through Dashiell Hammett's remarkable crime fiction, and you will discover that Sam Spade always called a hotel home in any backstage movie of the Thirties or Forties, the Noel Coward- esque playwright is always shown running around his opulent hotel suite in a dressing gown, a cigarette holder clamped between his teeth. And, of course, all hustlers (of a male or female variety) inevitably ply their trade from some $10 night slum.

Or, to put it another way - in the world according to popular culture, accountants, dentists, corporate lawyers, insurance adjusters, and proctologists do not live in hotels. Because, of course, hotels are not synonymous with social stability, civic virtue, high standing in the community, or monogamy.

However, it is a truth universally recognised that accountants, dentists, corporate lawyers, insurance adjusters, and proctologists do go to hotels when they want to commit adultery or take their lives. Because, let's face it, cheating on your spouse or overdosing on a vodka-and-Thorazine cocktail can be accomplished with far less stress in the neutral confines of a hotel room. You're not illicitly sullying the Egyptian cotton sheets that you and your partner chose together one Saturday afternoon at John Lewis. Nor are you committing the truly heinous sin of letting your loved ones discover your dead body. What's more, hotel suicides have a certain panache. There's nothing particularly romantic about gassing yourself in a Crouch End bedsit. But there is something stylish about checking into a deluxe room at The Ritz, in order to permanently check out.

These days, of course, hotels have also become brand names, products. Like automobiles, they reflect a wide spectrum of social aspirations, not to mention the nuances of class. Check into a Park Hyatt hotel anywhere in the world, and you are guaranteed to be treated like a member of senior management - because that Five Star chain gears itself largely to those upper-echelon types who drive BMWs and travel Executive Class. Spend a night at a Holiday Inn, on the other hand, and you enter the world of the middle-manager, the telemarketing trainer, the regional sales director. And if you are a style merchant, a media honcho, a wannabe member of the uber hip, or anyone who dresses predominantly in black, then the new series of Malmaison Hotels appeal - as they provide high contemporary style at a reasonable price.

Hotels, after all, are stage sets. They trade in artifice. Like bad popular fiction, they are heavily themed. And we are attracted to the fantasies they purvey. Upscale North Americans who suffer from that dreadful condition called Anglophilia want to spend a few nights in some Oxfordshire manor hotel, replete with four-poster bed and plush soft furnishings. On the other hand, every French friend of mine who has visited Las Vegas has always insisted on one of those gimcrack Honeymoon Suites, where the waterbed is circular and the ceilings are mirrored. Anyone who ventures to Miami Beach these days checks into a reproduction art deco world or the cool Phillipe Starck chic of the hotel Delano, whereas a guest at The Hempel in London discovers what it must be like to dwell in a minimalist environment that seems best suited to an anal-retentive Japanese control freak.

Hotels, in short, are realms unto themselves. They marry the functional (a place to eat, sleep, bathe) with the illusion of escape. For a few nights, we flee the prosaicness of our normal surroundings. Even if the hotel isn't stylish or luxe, it's still somewhere new. And we all need the shock of the new. Because in one way or another, we are all captives to routine ... and because, in a hotel, someone else picks up your dirty towels