[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

In which our correspondent finds that as hotels get higher, so do his levels of paranoia…

When jetlagged, or just plain – or plane – exhausted, a funny thing often happens to me. In the few moments between wakefulness and sleep, I experience a sudden sensation of falling.

For a long time I thought I was imagining it, and then I told myself it was perfectly natural, hence the phrase “falling asleep” or, worse, “dropping off”. But as it got worse, I became worried – so worried, in fact, that I did what anyone who is worried about their health does – I Googled it and found that the experience is relatively common.

It even has an amusing name – it’s a hypnic jerk. As Wikipedia (the source of all or any knowledge I’ve acquired in the past five years) tells me, it’s “an involuntary twitch that occurs during hypnagogia, just as the subject is beginning to fall asleep”. I can’t tell you how much reading that cheered me up. For a while.

The trouble is, my job often involves me sleeping in very high buildings. The company that books our travel seems to have an inordinate fondness for putting us in hotels with views. Depending on the city, that might mean five floors up, ten floors up, or sometimes 50 or 60.

I quite understand the economic necessity of mixed-use developments – offices, retail, apartments and hotel rooms all coexisting in one building – but why does the hotel have to be at the top? It takes ages to get a lift in the morning and evening, half the time you’re so high up that the clouds obscure whatever view you’re supposed to be looking at, and I’m very rarely in the room anyway (I’m supposed to be meeting clients, not sightseeing). Worst of all, when I experience my hypnic jerk, it’s 100 times worse because it feels like I’m dropping not only out of bed, but down 50 floors.

The feeling intensified as 2009 turned into 2010. You see, I’ve entered a new life phase. When I first started travelling, it was exciting – new cities, new people, new cuisines and new time zones. It’s the best job in the world to begin with – you feel like you’ve won the lottery. I still see that expression on the young faces in the lounges and the hotel restaurants, hunched over their Blackberries with the same look of rapt concentration you see on children playing with their Nintendo DSs.

But for me, that excitement has long passed. Boredom set in, cured only by internet access and the constant companionship of a laptop. Long nights of jetlag were passed by posting on forums, or shopping online. My wife says she can tell when I’ve slept particularly badly because the white vans start arriving at our home before I’m even back from the trip. I tell her one day the white van will be coming for me, but she thinks I’m talking about returns.

Recently, the boredom threatened to turn into irritation. As business class was banned by our company for any flight under ten hours, and hotels were downgraded to less expensive options (and even downsized in terms of height, the silver lining to that cloud), it became difficult to keep up the George Clooney grin. Oh, and the security checks, designed to inconvenience everyone but terrorists. And so on, and so on – you’ve sat next to people like me, I know.

But instead, the fatigue turned into anxiety. Heights I’ve already mentioned, but flights as well. I’m not scared of flying, but for me the security charade isn’t stale any more, it’s worrying. I’m alert to unattended bags, and I pay for exit seats not for the legroom but for the exit. I wait for the car to arrive at the hotel before coming down from my room and I don’t dine in restaurants off hotel lobbies. I prefer fixed-line internet access to wifi, I sit facing the double-locked door, and I check the sign on the back of it to find the quickest way out.

I’m careful with what I eat, and all the worry makes me lose weight – it’s win, win, yet still I worry. And on repeat play on my iPod is Talking Heads’ song Life During Wartime, the soundtrack to my miserable on-the-road existence (“I sleep in the daytime, I work in the night time, I might not ever get home”).

Yes, for this year, worry and its close bedfellow, paranoia, are my chosen travelling companions. We’ll get through these troubling times together.

[Author]

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