A Room Somewhere

A second piece about advance work, and again about nobody in particular. A press week is decided in the weeks before it, in choices that look like fussiness and are not.

Six nights. Four roundtables, two sit-downs, a morning-show pre-tape, an editorial dinner. That is a normal press week, and by the end of it you will have slept more than five hours perhaps twice. Nobody writes that schedule down as a health question. It is one.

The room gets chosen months ahead, and it gets visited. Someone sits in the chair. Someone checks the angle of the morning light against the mirror in the dressing room, because a week of photographs taken in a badly lit room is a week of photographs you will be looking at for years. Someone walks from the door of the suite to the street entrance with a stopwatch, twice: once by the guest lift, once by the service lift. The difference between the two is about thirty seconds, and thirty seconds is the difference between leaving calmly and leaving in front of people.

What that visit produces is a file on the room, and the file is kept. What changed since the last stay. What did not. Which fixtures throw light where. Whether the staff on that floor remember how you take your tea. Hotels keep excellent memories, and the good ones keep them discreetly, which is most of why a house returns to the same handful of buildings rather than shopping for the best rate.

The order of the roundtables is chosen, not accepted. Five reporters, forty minutes each, sequenced by publication schedule and by temperament. The furniture is moved before anyone arrives so that you sit with your back to the window and the reporter takes the light on one side of the face. That is kinder to you, and it is also kinder to the photograph the outlet eventually runs, which is the same thing arriving a month later.

Things go wrong in ordinary ways. A cold caught on the plane. An appointment that has to be cancelled at short notice, which is an eleven-minute phone call and a sentence about a family matter that does not bear discussion. Journalists understand the shape of that answer and do not press, and the cold is nobody’s business.

And things arrive that were not asked for. Flowers with an unsigned card, from someone you worked with years ago. The card gets photographed and the sender gets identified before the arrangement reaches the room you are sitting in, and a courteous note goes back the same morning. You may never hear about any of it. That is the correct outcome. A gift is not always a gift, and working out which is which is not your job on the fourth night of a press week.

At the end, the room is reset by people who do it well: linens changed, mirror cleaned, brass polished, chair returned to a position six inches from where it stood all week. Whatever you left behind is bagged, labelled with the date, and put on a shelf behind a desk, where it waits. Hotels are very good about this. The house is usually not told, and does not need to be.

None of the above is glamorous and none of it is difficult. It is a stopwatch, a file, a seating plan and a photograph of a card. It is the difference between a week that costs you something and a week that does not, and it is entirely a question of whether anyone bothered in February.