Cold chills

I have left the cold grumpiness of winter on the East Coast and come North, for the winter. For the week. For work.

This is more north than I’ve gone for a long while. This actual city I haven’t been to since another work trip, also for a conference, about 12 years ago. And before that on a family holiday, as a teenager.

It’s fucking freezing. Exceuse my French, but it really is. Not in the air, mind you. Not in the actual streets and outsides and beaches and landscapes, but here in my hotel. Icy. Arctic. Penguin. I rang reception. ‘Hi Noel, yes, me again, sorry to bother you, but um, how can I turn off my aircon – it’s freezing in here.’ I get instructions on how to turn the heat up and fan down, but I can’t actually turn the damned thing off. I oblige, and am met with icy jagged stalactite grin, ice teeth dripping, puffs of white dry ice mist bursting through my vents. Just about.

I am about to take a very warm bubbly bath and hope that the chill comes out of my skin and then I can lunge into a strange assortment of every outfit I brought piled on top of every other outfit, and hope for the best.

Maybe it’s a terribly dry and cunning strategy to move people to the warming mini bar or out of the room and down down into the tawdry depths of the (warmer) adjacent casino, with its flashing :blue LED’s and ping ping slot machines, and men looking awkwardly casual in short sleeve shirts and thick necks and guffaws, but feeling a little exposed, and unsure, and unlucky.

Not the glamourous Bond style casino of movie fame here girls and boys, no this is the poor cousin, everyone welcome, slouched and sunburnt, tizzied up for a night out, shaking my paper cup of coins with a big grin. This is ‘oh well, luck knows no colour, no qualifications, no dress size – this place is as much mine for the taking as anyone’s’. It’s sipped cocktails, and buffet dinner, and bleached hair blow-dried, and the nice dress with staggering heels, and men with their waists pulled in tight. It’s zombied at the slots. It’s RSL style carpets. It’s listen to me being holier than though but if I’m honest I’d spend a dollar or two at the pokies only if I was guaranteed I could do it casually, on my way back to my room, an ironic afterthought, and hear the kaching! Of a crazybig win, and me smile demurely and think ‘aaah, see, lucky’. The windfall without the effort – without even letting go of my distaste for the whole affair, the get it all without trying, the great story to tell back home, the takings without the (mis)givings. Which I know is what everyone wants, and no-one gets. So I don’t bother.

I come home (home! How quickly we mark territory ours – to my room I mean) and look forward to hot water on my skin and a cup of tea and chocolate and lying down and white sheets.