Further Under the Duvet (19 page)

Eventually, and in a bit of a panic, we found a place – Hotel Praha – on the internet. They claimed they’d be happy to take us. But strangely, it wasn’t in any guide books and although it was a mere five minutes’ walk from Niall’s apartment, he’d never heard of it. God only knew what it was like, but what choice did we have?

I’ll admit it: from the off, the omens weren’t good. First the flight from Dublin to London was massively delayed and we were terrified we’d miss our connection. The second we landed in London, we had to do an undignified, sweaty, inter-terminal trolley dash, with some of the older and more infirm members of our party crouched amongst the bags,
holding on to the trolley edges for dear life. In the nick of time, the
nick
of time – that’s what they kept telling us – we made the flight, the door slamming behind us the minute we wheezed aboard – and then… we went nowhere! We sat for what felt like days on the runway – at the very point at which it dawned on us how terribly, slaveringly hungry we were. We hadn’t eaten all day and wouldn’t be getting anything until the plane took off, if it ever did, and if it hadn’t been for my mother’s emergency stash of peanut M&Ms, we’d have started eating each other, like in that film about the plane crash in the Andes.

Worse was to come. When we landed in Prague, my bag, with all my Christmas presents in it, hadn’t made the journey. (I have extremely bad luggage karma. In a past life I must have been a baggage handler who nicked loads of stuff out of unlocked suitcases.) I’m so used to losing bags at this stage that I don’t bother waiting at the luggage carousel any more; I go straight to the lost luggage desk and start filling out the forms.

The rest of my family, complete with their luggage – lucky bastards – went on ahead, and when I’d filled in enough missing-bag documents to satisfy Czech bureaucracy, Himself and myself finally arrived at Hotel Praha. Now, at this point, it’s important to remember I’ve had a long stressful day, all I’ve had to eat is seven peanut M&Ms and my bag with all my lovingly purchased presents has disappeared and I’m fully convinced I’ll never see them again.

‘Welcome to Hotel Praha!’ the super-cheery desk-man said. ‘You are very late. Very, very late. So we have put you in a special room!’ Naturally enough, the day having gone
so badly, I presumed he meant a six-foot-square windowless box and I prepared to vault over the counter to savage him. But I paused mid-crouch when he continued, ‘When Tom Cruise was making
Mission Impossible
in Prague he stayed in the same suite for six weeks! Nicole cooked him dinner there!’

I narrowed my eyes at him. Taking the piss, was he? But what if… could there be a chance that maybe… he wasn’t…? Cautiously I accepted my key, gave him an I’ll-be-back-if-I-need-to look and made for our ‘special room’.

And your man wasn’t joking. Our room was very special – it was
enormous
, far bigger than our house in Dublin. It took ten minutes to walk from one end of the sitting room to the other (I’m exaggerating only slightly), it had four bathrooms, a dining table that seated twelve, an office and a massive balcony which overlooked Prague castle. (All the rooms have the same view.) And so what if I occasionally got an electric shock when I touched anything metal, and did it matter that the bathroom doors were constructed in such a way that if you closed the door while still holding the handle (and how else are you to do it?) your fingers became painfully trapped?

It was costing us eighty dollars a night. Forty dollars each. For nothing. My parents and siblings came to ooh and aah and I swaggered about, delighted with the sudden change in my fortunes.

‘Now aren’t you glad your bag got lost?’ Mam asked. ‘Come on, we’ve to go down for our carp. Listen, are they telling the truth about Tom Cruise?’

Hard to know but over the next few days enough staff swore blind that Tom really did stay in that selfsame room
and that Nicole really did visit him there, to convince me. As it happened, one of my Christmas presents was a velvet eye-mask (to aid restful sleep on bright summer mornings) but it came in very handy as a prop as Himself and myself pretended to be Tom and Nicole in
Eyes Wide Shut
. Oh
hours
of fun.

In the daylight we got a better look at the hotel and it was
gas
. Finished in 1981, it was the Czech attempt at late-seventies luxe. They were showing off – look at our most excellent, Vestern-style hotel, see how well the Soviet system is vorking for us hard-vorking Czechs – and many of the big names stayed there: Brezhnev, Andropov, Ceausescu.

No expense was spared in its interior: every single wall and door is clad in walnut and the scale of the place is
massive
. There’s a swimming pool, tennis courts, a beauty salon and expansive gardens. Even a skitless [sic] alley. (Badly crap, mind you.)

The outside is text-book Czech modernist architecture – mucho, mucho concrete, but it is curved and graceful; from the air it would look like a giant ‘S’ shape.

And it wasn’t just the architecture that was central European, and time-warped: the room-service menu listed ten different breakfasts, as follows. (I
love
this.) Breakfast # 1: 50 g of domestic cheese and 50 g of cold meat. Breakfast # 2: 100 g of domestic cheese. Breakfast # 3: 100 g of cold meat. And so on. Such precision dates from Soviet times when the fear of being swizzed was high. You could bring your own personal weighing scales just to check that the room-service boy hadn’t helped himself to a 5 g corner of your cheese en route from the kitchen. (Of course you pay a premium for having your
100 g of cheese delivered to your room – a whopping two euro will be added to your bill.)

However, the charming staff are not Soviet-style and are more than prepared to go ‘off menu’. I’ve requested – and been given – a non-menu yoghurt. And another time, a fruit salad. And another time, a banana.

However, the ‘orange’ ‘juice’ is authentically terrifying. It’s a long way from an orange that their ‘orange’ ‘juice’ was reared: syrup-thick and Day-Glo, like undiluted Miwadi. And the mini-bar is charmingly bereft of produce – a couple of bottles of local beer and some dodgy-looking, chemical-filled soft drinks is all you’ll get.

On account of Ema and Luka, Himself and myself go to Prague a lot and now we always stay at the Praha – although sadly we’ve never had the Tom Cruise suite again, but even the ordinary rooms have character and space.

For ages, we seemed to be the only people there. Although there are four floors, we were only ever put on the first, leading us to suspect that the other three floors were covered in dust-sheets, like a hotel version of Miss Havisham, waiting for the visitors to return. And then, lo and behold, they did! On a recent visit the Germans had arrived, busloads of them. Filming something. A fashion show, perhaps. Or… or… maybe a porn film. Lots of busty blonde women running around in see-through tops and beardy men in leather trousers filming them.

Then another time we went – how bizarre is this? – the Galway choral society were doing a concert. Luka and Ema were wheeled along to experience the Irish side of their heritage and Luka was evidently very moved because during
a sixteen-part harmony of ‘Danny Boy’ he lunged at the front row of warblers with his plastic knight’s sword we’d bought for him in Ikea (yes, they have IKEA in Prague) and had to be hauled off.

I love the Praha. It’s a kind of memorial to a Soviet past and the staff are welcoming and incredibly obliging and, without wishing to slag the Czechs, that’s not always the case. (Sometimes in Prague I’m in terrible danger of becoming the irritating kind of person who says, ‘Cheer up, love, it might never happen.’) It’s also far enough from the town centre that if you don’t want stag parties gawking their guts up outside your room every night, the Praha’s your man.

Okay, it’s not in the middle of town and if you need to be in staggering distance of your hotel, it’s not for you. But if you’re not afraid of a tram ride and you’d like to see a little remainder of Prague’s recent past, you might give it a whirl. Honest to God, they’re so nice. Tell them I sent you.

A version of this was first published in
Abroad,
May 2004
.

The world is divided into two types of people: those who love New Year’s Eve and those who hate it. Those who love it celebrate it by going to parties, wearing glittery deely boppers, joyously doing the conga, shouting, ‘TEN, NINE, EIGHT…’ with gusto, kissing everyone in sight and generally feeling full of hope for the forthcoming year. The other kind – and they can be perfectly sociable for the other 364 nights of the year – find that New Year’s Eve plunges them into a black despair. I, to my shame, belong in the latter gang.

I can’t really articulate what happens to me, but when everyone else is looking forward, I look backwards. Old mortifications present themselves for inspection and I feel like a big, fat failure. It’s like the stock-taking I do every birthday, only somehow far, far worse. So great is my gloom, I feel that if a tinselly deely bopper was placed on my head, it would instantly tarnish and the last thing I want to do, as one year clicks over into a new one, is triumphantly blow a paper bugle, then snog my dentist.

What makes things even harder is the scorn the deely bopper gang pour on my discomfort and their utter disbelief that I might prefer to stay at home and watch
Billy Elliot
. ‘But it’s the best night of the whole year! Don’t be so mad.
Here,’ they say, handing me a gaudily coloured tube, ‘open that when we’re all yelling, “Happy New Year”. It shoots streamers everywhere.’

As time has passed, I have met others of my kind, a small secret band. We all suffer from Extreme New Year’s Eve Fear (ENYEF – pronounced ‘Enough!’) and our greatest challenge was the mother of all New Year’s Eves: the Millennium. I knew our angst would be magnified two thousandfold and suddenly I had a great idea for how we’d get through that night. I’d provide a safe house! All clocks would be hidden, so we’d have no idea when the dreaded midnight was upon us. We’d have Audrey Hepburn films, duvets, mashed potato, warm baths and every other cocooning device imaginable.

But somehow the deely bopper gang got wind of the gathering and they were totally unable to understand that
this was not a party
. Before I knew it, crates of champagne were being ferried in and the house was being draped with shiny red ‘Happy New Millennium’ banners and special one-off deely boppers – they had ‘2000’ written on them – were being distributed as guests arrived. It was a nightmare!

And if New Year’s Eve is upon us, can New Year’s Day be far behind?

New Year’s Day always feels to me like the day after the world has ended. It has a shocked, stunned air to it; people shakily emerge as though they’re coming round from a blow to the head. We look at all the crappy presents received and given and remember that shameful business with the trifle on Christmas Day (no one else wanted any, I only meant to take one spoonful, etc., etc.) and think, ‘What
happened
?’

After the utter excess of Christmas, the pendulum swings the other way so that the most commonly asked question on New Year’s Day (after ‘Have you any Nurofen?’ and ‘Er, any idea how I got home last night?’) is, of course, ‘What are your New Year’s Resolutions?’

Because I have always overdone everything (not my fault, I was born without a ‘stop’ button), I completely understand the urge to purge and refashion myself. Until recently my entire life has been Operation Fresh Start. Most Mondays, I’d think: this is the week when I’ll grab my life by the throat and bend its will to mine. I will lose that half-stone, I will cease my buying frenzy of lovely Jo Malone scented candles, I will learn Serbo-Croat (or something).

Therefore, I’m the perfect candidate for New Year’s Resolutions. And I’ve always made
tons
of them. I’ve spent much of my life living in some faraway Utopian future, where I am svelte, a restrained shopper and fully conversant in most major European languages. Everything will be lovely when that happens but until then my life kind of goes on hold.

Every New Year’s Day I am full of steely resolve: this is the year when I’ll really change. But sooner or later – and it’s usually sooner – I buckle and start eating, shopping and speaking English again. Naturally I end up feeling wretched with guilt and self-hatred.

So this year my New Year’s Resolution is not to make any New Year’s Resolutions. Life is tough enough for all of us without overloading ourselves with guilt trying to achieve some perfect (and frankly unattainable) state. The facts are: I will not lose that half-stone (and just between us, it’s more
like a stone now) – if it was going to happen it would have happened by now; everyone in Europe speaks English; and what’s the harm in having a couple of scented candles about the place?

Forgive me (no, really, please do, I’m slightly mortified by this) for a Trisha-esque platitude, but life is what happens while we’re waiting for it to be perfect enough to live it.

Happy New Year.

First published in
Marie Claire,
January 2005
.

‘Yiz dirty culchies, yiz muck savages!’ The jeers rained down on our heads. Himself and myself were going to Croke Park, to the hurling quarter-final between Clare and Galway and our route took us through a part of inner-city Dublin where they have to make their own entertainment. Ten-year-old boys with the wizened faces of old men, smoked and leant over the balconies of their flats, partaking of the ancient jackeen sport of culchie-mocking.

Seeing as I was born in Limerick, they were within their rights, but Himself was born in England, of English parents, from a long line of English people. People who didn’t know better might call him English. However, he’s Irish. He’s a transnational – an Irishman trapped in an Englishman’s body – and since he moved here seven years ago, his assimilation process is almost complete. He has learnt Irish, he drinks Guinness – and he loves the GAA. His football team is Dublin, but his hurling team is Clare. (Long story, my mother’s from there, we spend a lot of time there, a great attachment to the place and the people, etc., etc.)