HOTEL FOR PHOBICS
Britain’s first hotel for phobics has opened in Firbeck Avenue, Skegness, helped by £42,000 from the Government’s small firm guarantee loan. Mr Tony Elliott, founder of Nottinghamshire Phobics Association, said:‘People may have all sorts of psychological problems and we will try to look after them at the seaside.’
Daily Telegraph
Dear Sylvia,
Well here we all are, safe and sound if you do not count Norman’s hairpiece blowing off coming from the station, that is one of the little penalties of having to keep your head stuck out of cab windows, I am always on at him to get his claustrophobia looked at but it is not easy to find a doctor who will see him in the middle of a field. We would have stopped to retrieve it, but a gull was on it like a bloody bullet, it is probably halfway up a cliff by now with three eggs in it.
Sorry, Sylve, I had to break off there for a minute, it was writing cliff did it, one of my little turns come on, I had to put my head between my knees and suck an Extra Strong, I do not have to tell you why, I know; remember that time before we was married and you and me went to the Locarno, Streatham, and that ginger bloke sitting by the spot-prize display asked me to dance, and when he got on his feet he was about six feet nine and I brought my Guinness up?
Anyway, we got to the hotel all right, apart from Norman’s bloody mother trying to avoid stepping on the pavement cracks between the cab and the gate and walking into a gravel bin, she come down a hell of a wallop and her case burst open and her collection of bottle tops was bouncing all over the place, it took us near on two hours to get her into her room in the cellar on account of no lift below ground floor, so the management had to bag her up and winch her down through the coal chute, all on account of she can’t get to sleep unless she hears rats running about. Still, one consolation is that that’s the last we’ll see of the old bat for two weeks, due to where Norman will not go inside, Tracy comes out in blackheads if there’s no windows, big Kevin is allergic to hot water pipes, little Barry gets diarrhoea in the presence of rodents, and me, well, you know about me and bottle tops!
The landlady was ever so nice about Norman. They had a bed all made up for him in the shrubbery, no plants so big he couldn’t see over them if he began to panic in the night, and a very nice man near him, but not too near, who sleeps in the middle of the lawn with his foot roped to a sundial in the event of gravity suddenly stopping and him falling off into space. Turned out they had a lot of army experience in common: they both had boots as pets, during National Service.
My room is quite nice, too, lots of things to arrange: you can stand the coffee table on the tallboy and put the hearthrug on it with the potty on top, and if you turn the potty upside down you’ll find it’s large enough to stand a hairspray aerosol on it. Of course, it’s all getting a bit high by then, but it looks lower if you stand on the bed, so I’m quite happy really, even if I can’t have Tracy sharing with me due to bees figuring prominently in the wallpaper, and I can’t visit her, either, on account of they’ve put her on the top floor. It’s all expense, Sylve, isn’t it? Still, we managed to get big Kevin and little Barry to share: the management found them a triangular room, so they’ve got a corner each to stand in, leaving only one for them to keep an eye on; they can get quite a lot of sleep, in turns.
Mealtimes are great fun, everybody is ever so sociable, there’s a very nice man from Norwich I think it is, who comes round to every table just after we’ve all sat down and touches every single piece of cutlery, and two charming sisters from Doncaster who eat standing on their chairs due to the possibility of mice turning up sudden, and a former postmaster who sings ‘Nola’ whenever there’s oxtail soup. My Norman has been a great hit, due to not coming in for meals: everybody takes it in turns to go to the window and feed him, also give him little titbits to carry over to his friend tied to the sundial, because the waitress has agoraphobia and can’t even look at the forecourt without going green.
Not that there aren’t little squabbles from time to time: Sunday, we had plums and custard, and little Barry likes to arrange the stones on the side of his dish. What he did not realize was that this makes Mr Noles from Gants Hill, who is on our table, punch people in the mouth. Big Kevin, as you know, is not called big Kevin for nothing and has had to learn to look after himself from an early age, due to where his father is unable to come inside and help him, big Kevin took hold of Mr Noles by his collar and chucked him out into the corridor, which was a terrible thing to do, it turned out, because Mr Noles has a horrible fear of narrow places and pays £2 per day extra to enter the dining-room via the fire-escape, but big Kevin was not to know this, he is only a boy, though getting enormous enough for me to feel queasy every time I stretch up to make sure he’s brushed his teeth. The upshot of it was, Mr Noles was hurling himself about in the corridor for close on twenty minutes before Mrs Noles could get a net over him. He broke eighteen plaster ducks, three barometers, and put his elbow straight through ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, though doing less damage than you might think since its face had already been painted out on account of the night porter having a morbid fear of antlers.
And all the time my Norman is shouting ‘What’s going on? What’s bloody going on?’ from the garden, deeply distressing his friend tied to the sundial who can hear all this breakage and shrieking and reckons gravity is beginning to pack up and bring things off the walls.
Still, it turned out all right, Mr Noles and big Kevin made it up, they have a lot in common, basically, both being unable to walk down a street without picking bits off hedges, and he asked big Kevin to join him on the beach because Mrs Noles never went there on account of her terror of being buried alive. She likes to spend her afternoons standing on the concrete forecourt with a big bell in her hand and a whistle between her teeth in case of emergencies, so her husband and big Kevin and little Barry and Tracy and Norman and me all went off to the beach. Trouble was, it would all have been all right if Norman’s new friend hadn’t been unsettled by the false alarm over gravity: he did not want to be left alone, so the porter found a huge coil of rope so that Norman’s new friend could come down to the beach without untying himself from the sundial, but it was nearly three hundred yards and you have to go round two corners, so you can’t see what’s going on behind, and what happened was the rope got caught in a car bumper and one moment Norman’s new friend was cautiously creeping along beside us, and the next he was suddenly plucked from our midst.
We visited him in the cottage hospital, but even our presence (minus, of course, Norman, also Tracy, who faints in the vicinity of linoleum) could not persuade him that he had not fallen off Earth and hurt himself dropping onto some alien planet. His argument was that we had fallen with him but, being unencumbered by rope or sundials, had managed to land on our feet, unhurt, and were keeping the truth from him so as not to alarm an injured man.
There was no convincing him, so we just left him there and collected Norman and Tracy and went down to the beach to find big Kevin and Mr Noles. But all we could find was big Kevin, he was huddled under a stack of deck-chairs and sobbing: we ran up to him (all except little Barry, who was terrified in case the shadow of the deck-chairs fell on his foot), and asked him what was wrong, and he said he had been getting on fine, he had buried Mr Noles in the sand, because Mr Noles had been told by his psychiatrist that this was a very good way to overcome his fear of narrow spaces, and he was just about to stick a little windmill over where he had buried him when a crab come out of the sea and started running towards him sideways.
We all gasped!
‘It is my own fault,’ shouted Norman, from a nice open space he had found in between the airbeds, ‘I knew the lad was an arachnophobe, it never occurred to me that he would associate crabs with spiders, that is not the sort of thing what occurs to a claustrophobe on account of you never get near enough to anything to distinguish it.’
‘So what happened, big Kevin?’ I said, aghast.
‘I run off, Mum,’ he sobbed. ‘I must have run miles.’
A cold chill shot down my spine, as if I’d just seen the Eiffel Tower or something.
‘Where is Mr Noles buried?’ I enquired, gently.
I think you probably know the answer to that, Sylve. I tell you, we prodded lolly-sticks all over that beach for five hours, i.e. well after it was too late anyway, and no luck. It was getting dark before I knew I would have to be the one to break the news to Mrs Noles. Her of all people.
She was still standing on the forecourt when we got back to the hotel. I put my hand on her arm.
‘How are you, Mrs Noles?’ I murmured.
‘Nicely, thank you,’ she replied. ‘I got a bit worried around half-past four. The sun was very hot, and I thought: any minute, this asphalt is going to melt and swallow me up. But it didn’t.’
Quick is best, I said to myself, Sylve. So I come right out and told her that Mr Noles had been buried alive. And do you know what she said?
‘Serves him right, the stingy bastard,’ she said. ‘I always told him we ought to have bought a bell each.’
That’s the best thing about holidays, Sylve, I always say: you meet so many interesting people.
It takes you right out of yourself.
Your loving friend, Sharon.