She wasn’t. Someone else was. Mr Henry ruminates about his trip and accommodation during this factfinding mission.
I had never before slept in a three-by-nine foot bike shed, but on this trip I spent not one but two nights in one. This was, after all, Amsterdam, the bike capital of the world. The home owner’s derelict mountain bike was rusting away in the tiny backyard under faded Tibetan prayer flags. To be fair, the shed walls had been painted (blue) and there was power.
As these words are committed to the screen, I am in an apartment in Prague, where I can’t get the damned induction stove to work and where I have only just discovered, when the need was highest, that the owner did, after all, lay by a supply of toilet rolls.
In Cracow, the brand new “studio” in an antique apartment block featured the sound of an erratic, overenthusiastic cuckoo clock in the apartment below. Rats raced around in the ceiling. The kitchen bench down-lights could only be switched off at the fuse box, an electrician’s minor oversight.
A cold war warrior from way back, I was very excited to spend two nights in what I describe as a “Stalinist” apartment block. This was Warsaw, which was razed to the ground on Hitler’s orders, so after the war plenty such blocks went up. What an experience it was! The Stalinist plumbing gave up under the glasnost of my first post-breakfast ablutions and copious additional flushing did not improve matters. Quite the opposite in fact, but to my credit even though I say so myself, I did not dwell on the negative, notching the blockage up as “a win for capitalism and the free world”.
After two nights in the bike shed though, I decided to switch, booking – again on AirBnB – a “private room hosted by Brenda”, the relevant page showing an Ikea-type bedroom set-up and a thumbnail photo of a youngish, trim, blonde woman, who would, I presumed, be Brenda.
Following the AirBnB prompts, I struck out by tram and on foot. The address proved hard to find. Directions obtained from workers at a council depot were vague, although one worker insisted that the address was in a seniors living complex.
When eventually I found what indeed looked ominously like an independent living arrangement and when I had rung the bell, a portly, aged, black woman answered the door. Very obviously, this was not the Brenda of AirBnB fame, but what could I say, except, “Are you Brenda?” In response, the door was slammed shut and an emergency call for police assistance threatened from behind it.
Unfortunately, the AirBnB link to Google maps routinely, it seems, throws up an inaccurate host address, the Stalinist apartment with the dodgy plumbing in Warzaw being another example. In both cases, I eventually arrived and I can confirm that it is possibly to sleep, and sleep soundly, in an Ikea-appointed bedroom provided you keep your eyes shut at all times. It beats a bike shed, anyway.
