The corruption of Public Space is an inevitable impact of the Corporate Culture-car parks and CCTV and vile brutalist many-roomed battery hen hotels. Here's my recent experience:
I recently had a very unpleasant two days staying in the very awful Northampton Marriot Hotel-a dull hideous building set just outside what is a very interesting city implicated in every aspect of Britain's industrial revolution. As well as notoriously being the birthplace of Comics genius, and Chaos Magician, and general bad boy, Alan Moore,
At £130 a night and additional breakfast costs of £13.60 yes that is £13.60! I expected to be carried in from my taxi on a dais by a quartet of Mr Universe winners and massaged by winnowed maidens until my bones melted and I collapsed into a huge four poster to the sound of an actual live quintet who would discreetly withdraw as I began to snore in contented and much deserved slumber on feathered down cushions produced by highly spoilt free ranging geese from Hungary.
Oh and I had to pay a further £350 for a training in a emotionally malnourished methodology for working with people with a learning disability called PAMS. But I will write about this scam in more detail in a few weeks.
But alas no. The Corporate World cuts service to the bone because service costs. And the imagination of the corporate world as illustrated by my Marriot Hotel stay is constrained at every level by penny pinching, mean spirited, high priced servility that I found actually quite disgusting. What a horrible place to have to be away from home-without warmth, humour, beauty, or creativity. You have a problem? Well the organisation won't sort it for you. Don't want to pay £13.60 for a rasher of bacon and a sausage. Oh well you have paid in advance and 'we cannot refund your payment because it has to go to our central office...etc...etc...'
Oh my God I had to stay at the Sheffield Holiday Inn! More Kafka than Burroughs! Great city though. The Museum Pub-brilliant fish and chips and the friendliest welcoming staff. Returning to the Holiday Inn was like going back to an underfunded psychiatric unit!
Oh my God I had to stay at the Coventry Ibis! Like a secret meeting place for paedophiles or GRU assassins or dark web dissemblers, or purveyors of dodgy psychedelic shipments from Malawi, or a venue for organ transplant smugglers, or just people who were struggling financially but were also actually evil.
Oh my eyes and whiskers! I stayed at The Jury's Inn in Glasgow-my birthplace you donut! It was ok-ish but then I was with my brother!
How do you find the best B&B's for struggling writers, philosophers and social workers, revolutionary poets and barabarous artists?
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