Loch Ness Blog

From Truly

This October, my Grandma and Grandpa Jaggers flew from Colorado for a visit. After spending a week in my new Glasgow digs, we were off to visit family in Suffolk. While getting spending time with my family (many of whom I’d never met before) was incredible, I thought that it might be a fun adventure while I was down south to scurry off to London by myself midweek to visit a Chicago friend currently studying there. And when booking my London lodgings, I thought it the perfect time to have a quintessential European hostel stay.

I’d envisioned my first hostel experience to be a warm one. The dormitory would be painted a cheerful yellow and the sheets would be crisp and white. My fellow travelers would be young and eager to meet new pen pals. We would sit in our bunk beds at night, wearing purifying face masques and sharing licorice, chatting about our travels. Perhaps a matronly German woman would march into the dorm, flick off the lights, and bellow, “light out!” before we would giggle, flick on a flashlight and continue with our tales. We’d be fed sugared gruel in the morning, sweep the dormitory together while singing songs from The Sound of Music, pay our eleven pounds, and be on our merry way.

So you can imagine how horrified I was when the only chatter my dorm mates exchanged was the noise of night farts and nose blowing. And this wasn’t even remotely the worst of it.

After checking into The Ashley House Hostel, I punched in the women’s dormitory key code and leaned into the leaden door. The smell shocked me. The room seeped its own bottled-up, stewing stenches: damp socks, clogged pores, used tampons, an addict’s sweaty, sallow skin. A diamond shaped ceiling window cast the room’s only light onto cold cinderblock walls. Bunk beds creaked as mammoth bundles, my fellow roommates I presumed, shifted in their blankets.

Once my eyes adjusted, I found my bed: top bunk, #15. Like all the top bunks, the mattress was surrounded by a plexi-glass, open-lidded coffin to prevent me from falling in the night and cracking my head open on the concrete floor, where rats, scorpions, sullied bras, and other articles of unmentionable dread would scuttle over my travel-weary corpse.

The frail metal bed screeched under my weight as I climbed the ladder to my coffin. A bit whipped from the bus/train/subway ride into London followed by a pleasant afternoon with my Chicago pal, I was ready to stretch out and close my eyes (and nostrils) for a tic before heading out to dinner. Once atop my Nicole Richie-thin mattress, I exhaled, closed my eyes, and mustered every bit of Zen within to conjure up a mental place less hellish than my present surroundings.

Just as I was drifting off, a strange dampness started to creep in. I felt around at my bedding. It was wet! I sniffed it (gross, I know) and was slightly relieved to catch the whiff of detergent. But irritated nonetheless that my hosts felt that washing was hospitable enough; “what, you want us to dry it all too?”

I clamored down the ladder with my dripping sheets in tow and complained to the apathetic zombie manning the front desk. And for my efforts, I was given a second set of bedding. It was just as wet, if not wetter, than the first. Needless to say, this was light years away from the happy hostel of my imaginings. In reality, the type of lodgings you get for eleven pounds in downtown London is this: a mildew infested homeless shelter.

After wearily locking up my backpack in the front desk safe, from which if my items had gone missing the dubious hostel would not be responsible, I decided to leave the squalor behind and treat myself to a glorious glass of white wine and dinner al fresco in Covent Garden. And with the warm glow of commerce flooding from the shops, with stylish parties en route to the theatre promenading down the cobblestone walk, with street performers filling the night air with song, with the lemon-drop yellow glow of lamplight warming the old market place, I did just that. Between sips of Riesling and stanzas of a street musician’s decent attempts at Counting Crows songs, I thought of my Chicago pal.

We first met at the writing center I used to work at. Her essays were absolutely whip smart, saturated in voice, and unfailingly funny. Exactly like she is. It made me happy to see her doing so well, imagining great things for her life. I hadn’t really talked to her since our semester together, and it felt great to reconnect, to reintroduce ourselves in a way.

Before my traumatizing check-in at the youth hostel, we met in a London downpour at the statue of Eros. We were scheduled to photograph Chinatown together, but the rain was too torrential to subject our precious cameras to it. Instead we sipped honeydew and mango bubble teas and watched the world go by. We wandered through the city to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where we marveled at the Japanese netsuke sculptures there. We explored beautiful English gardens and spoke of things past and future.

I didn’t want to impose myself on my Chicago pal during the evening; she had night classes to contend with, after all. And so here I was in Covent Garden, letting the music (and the wine) wash over me, knowing full well that this would be the last pretty scene of the night before heading back to the sordid hostel.

Curling up in my wet blankets that night, I dreamt of scabies and spiders. I woke at 5 am and hightailed it away from The Ashley House as soon as I could, in no mood to stick around to see about the sugared gruel. And even though I might have slept a tad longer if given a bed that was actually dry, it was gorgeous to see a London morning.

The sun came up over the city, waking it with soft mango-colored caresses. I watched the traffic unfold from a park bench, photographed shadows as they shifted, devoured a chocolate hazelnut croissant. I walked the city, meandering down crooked lanes, browsing through boutiques, and thumbing my way through used bookstores. I breathed in the brisk air of the Thames and made wishes on its bridges.

London wakes.

Rar.

Strike a pose.

My dog!

My buttress!

Angels with tails. Or mer-children with wings.

Pretty park.

River walk.

At noon I was at Tate Modern to meet up with Shaun, who had just flown into London (from Glasgow) to come back to Suffolk with me to meet my English relatives. At the Tate, we played on the Carsten Holler sculptures called The Unilever Series: Test Site. The sculptures were huge, twisty slides that cascaded from the 2, 3, and 5th floors of the museum, invoking what the French writer Roger Caillois describes as, “a voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.” (Yes, I stole that scrumptious line from the wall text.)

*Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!*

At the Tate, I also fell in love with Richard Hamilton’s $he and Francis Bacon’s Second Version of Triptych. Not to mention my long lost husband. We’d been apart for about a time whilst he traveled to Frankfurt and I to Suffolk. We kissed among the Gillian Wearing photographs and my bones, chilled from the damp squalor of The Ashley House, softened and warmed. Comfort was here again.