Travel To The Very Edge, ThreadZoomMash Piece, Performed At “The Virtual Glad”, 10 June 2020

The Beechwood Hotel, renamed The Lakeside Hotel, prior to closure

I shouldn’t be here this evening. I should be in Edgbaston, savouring the build up to the first cricket test match of the summer. It’s an annual gathering with good friends I met through The Children’s Society; we started our Edgbaston tradition more than 20 years ago.

It’s OK. I’m glad to be here with you. I like being here, in virtual ThreadMash or ThreadZoom or ZoomMash or whatever we’re calling it now…

…with you.

It’s just that I wouldn’t be here at all, but for the virus.

I’d be travelling.

Rohan has asked us to write about travel.

Rohan has advised us, “let’s do this without any pictures or music”. He didn’t say, “this advice is not a request – it is an instruction”, but he could have done.

Anyway, for me, the instruction, “write about travel”, is not a difficult one. I have travelled a lot and have been writing up my travels on Ogblog these past few years. 

I considered relating to you the tale of me and Janie jumping the border between Laos and Thailand at Chong Mek, then blagging our way out of Thailand again. Don’t try that stunt at home…hmm.

I thought you might relish hearing about the occasion when, in Nicaragua, I put my naviphobia aside  only for us to end up marooned in a boat on the Pacific. We survived that one as well…obviously.

Or, I might have stuck with the theme of cricket – after all I should be in Edgbaston this week, not here – and tell you about the weird day when I was press-ganged into commentating live on a cricket match in Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh – a tribal state in the central plains of India. Janie and I were all over the papers and cable TV for that one.

But no.

Sod it.

I should be in Edgbaston right now and the minor matter of a global pandemic is not going to stop me from going there.

Birmingham might not exactly be an exotic location, nor is it a remote location, but going to Birmingham IS travel.

I’m going to Edgbaston and I’m going right now and I’m taking you lot with me…

…to the very worst hotel I have ever stayed in.

Late May 2006. Most of our gang, known as The Heavy Rollers, who together had savoured the 2005 Edgbaston test, a match that will forever be part of Ashes folklore, were to be reunited as a group for the first time since that match.

We knew that 2006 was to be different. 2005 had marked the end of our early era, which had enabled us to base ourselves at the Wadderton Conference Centre, the Children’s Society place in rural Worcestershire, just outside Birmingham. David Steed, who was one of our number in the Heavy Rollers, ran the place and lived on site. The Children’s Society was pleased for a bit of income from guests in the quiet summer period and it was mighty convenient and pleasant for us, with a suitable garden for pre-match cricket antics.

The time that Charley “The Gent Malloy” chased a cricket ball down the Wadderton slope, only to realise too late that the incline was too steep for a graceful deceleration, such that he went…how do I put this politely…arse over tit, into a heap at the bottom of said slope…remains as much part of Heavy Rollers folklore as the classic 2005 Ashes test match.

But I digress.

Late May 2006. Wadderton had closed permanently that winter. Now David Steed, bless him, ran Wadderton wonderfully and was subsequently a superb host at his Birmingham house. But he possibly wasn’t the best judge of a hotel unseen. Cheap and near the ground seemed sufficient criteria for him. An e-mail came:

Accommodation is confirmed as previously written about and subsequent telephone chat at Beechwood Hotel on the Bristol Road approx. 200 yards from the main entrance at Edgbaston…no deposits required…

The subsequent inquiry identified Nigel “Father Barry”, our de facto leader, as the other side of correspondence that clearly lacked the investigative skills, penetrating questions and due diligence that such matters deserve.

Thus the term “each with private bathroom”, did not preclude each of us having to toddle down a corridor to get to our nominated ablution booth.

“Private”, I suppose, did not necessarily mean “en suite” in this Beechwood world. Nor did it mean anything more than a tiny, decrepit shower cubicle. I recall some very inappropriate jokes about Zyklon B from my companions during conversations about those ghastly, disgusting showers.

The place was clearly used mostly as a sort-of social services half-way house for people who were having a multitude of difficulties. I took detailed notes about my alarming next-door neighbour, who I discovered heavily tattooed, talking frantically to himself and pissed…at six in the evening. At least he called me “young fella” when he greeted me warmly. We had a bizarre conversation or two.

But the most bizarre conversations were with Tom; I hesitate to use the title, “manager”, who tended to sidle up to us in the bar/common parts areas of the hotel and bend our ears with tales of his roller-coaster and/or imagined past. I made some fragmented notes:

I was a millionaire at 21…a multi-millionaire at 24…lost it all at 33…I’ve been out with Miss Jamaica, Miss Bromsgrove, the lot. I had an Aston Martin – would cost about £125,000 today…Do fast cars while you’re young, young man, you won’t fancy it once you are your dad’s age….I made a million when a million was real money; when a million was really a million…

In a more modern era, we would never have ended up there. At least one of us would have looked at TripAdvisor to check out the Beechwood Hotel. But back then, such web sites barely existed. The earliest on-line review of the Beechwood Hotel is on holidaywatchdog.com, TripAdvisor’s UK predecessor, a year after our stay; Spring 2007.  There are six reviews on that site, before the hotel was closed down in 2009 and became a squat for the Earth First Social Justice Permaculture warriors.

All six reviews give the Beechwood Hotel one-out-of-ten: “awful”. One reviewer takes pains to point out that the system doesn’t allow their preferred score of nought-out-of-ten.

Rohan said, in his instruction, “I think the words you use will create much more vibrant pictures than anything that can appear on a screen”. 

But in the mode of that great traveller, Dominic Cummings, I shall now break the spirit if not the letter of Rohan’s guidance, by using the words of others, those six unfortunate holidaywatchdog.com reviewers who followed in our footsteps, rather than my own words, to complete the painting of those vibrant pictures. One extracted quote from each victim:

• “This hotel makes Fawlty Towers seem like luxury.”
• “I really cannot believe that places like this are allowed to operate.”
• “This hotel should be condemned on health and safety grounds!”
• “I do not recommend this hotel to anyone if you have standards”.
• “Hell hole!”. 

And my personal favourite, the final review, from August 2009:

“Please stay away – I have stayed in 100s of hotels and B&BS all over the UK – this one has to be the worst by a long way… DO NOT STAY THERE, you’d be better off in a cardboard box.”