by Sally Hammond
The showerhead is enormous – as big as a dinner plate, delivering a storm cloud of big fat droplets, pretty much like standing under a tropical waterfall. The hotel guidelines in the room rabbit on about it too, calling it a 'serious shower', and then – and this you have to like – gives guests full permission to nick off with their toiletries. 'Do take them,' it demands. Who would refuse such an invitation?
It's not at all how you would expect an English hotel bathroom to behave.
More than 200 years ago Samuel Johnson described Bristol as so bad he wished he was in Scotland, his companion declaring himself 'by no means pleased with his inn' there. A couple of centuries later, I am very happy indeed to be in Bristol - and I like my inn as well.
In Boswell's time, when he penned that critical review, Bristol was quite a different place though: dirty, dangerous and working class, if you believe contemporary writers. At that time 'my inn' was working hard too as a sugar house, converting grimy sugar-beet tubers into glassy crystals suitable for the gentry's afternoon cuppas.
(finishes…)
Yet Bristol is more than just a city-port destination. It's the ideal hub for exploration into so many diverse areas: Wales, Cornwall, Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds are on the doorstep. Leave the city, and suddenly you are back to narrow hedged lanes, views across rumpled green velvet meadows, dark woods, or seaside villages tempting you with ice cream made from the milk of local dairy herds.
So why not stay locally in a hotel with sugar connections? Chances are you'll have sweeter memories of Bristol because of it.
(900 words)
©Sally Hammond 2008
Picture Credits: Gordon Hammond
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