Are Irish hotels turning into convalescent homes? James Ryanis worried
How bad is it out there? Why are there so many places promising to help people relax and recover? Is everybody ill? More and more hotels seem to be turning into convalescent homes, some offering as many treatments as a small hospital. Guest patients trundle around the corridors in white robes. They come down to breakfast in robes. Occasionally, they walk around the grounds in robes. Cheerful, uniformed staff, mainly women with tightly trussed hair, oversee their welfare. Okay, so there are no trolleys in the lobbies, but a hospital hush, underscored by piped Muzak - Für Elise, usually - prevails. Just add neon lighting and spooky corridors and you wouldn't know the difference.
Towelling is the big thing. All that mopping up, absorbing and drying. What on earth is being exuded? Does a booming economy lead to an increase in the production of human effluent? It may well be that a week spent tracking fluctuations in the Nikkei from a hermetically sealed high rise requires a weekend exfoliating in Wexford or Wicklow. If so, then these crossover institutions, offering recovery and restoration, fulfil a necessary if lamentable function.
One of the worries about all this is that hotels not currently offering to induce guests to exude may, in time, feel obliged to do so. A retrograde development, no doubt about it. Hotels, particularly those in town and city centres, have long played a pivotal part in the life that goes on around them. If they take the convalescent route and, let's say, hire a bulging Brunhilda to pummel people to death in the basement, or build an extension to accommodate dozens of static bicycles, then that pivotal social role will, sadly, diminish.
Unease about these crossover hotels and because-you're-worth-it institutions has been smouldering in the back of my mind for years. It erupted a couple of weeks ago when my wife and I found ourselves in one of them. We arrived in the eerily empty lobby and came face to face with a geisha whom I thought was some kind of ethnic mannequin. She began to bow and curtsey backwards as we approached. Was it possible, I wondered, that she'd been led to believe that the more subservient she was the more welcome we would feel? Where are these absurd notions of service coming from?
The number of white wraps in the less-is-more bedroom created the impression that a whole chapter of the Ku Klux Klan had just disrobed. A brochure on the lacquered table, offering enough therapies and treatments to raise the dead, conjured up a Kafkaesque impression of operating-theatre-like rooms around the hotel, with pale, anaesthetised people stretched out on tables, connected by a matrix of electrodes to machines that changed the way they functioned.
But what really turned the notion of luxury on its head was the icy formality of the diningroom. I, henceforward referred to as Sir, was handed a large embossed menu. After more bowing and fawning from an eager but misled east-European waiter I scanned the list of ludicrous dishes - quinoa, scallions and tabbouleh; couscous and pomegranate; dairy-free risotto - until I came to the well-disguised paying-husband option. It was, as it always is in fanatically health- conscious places, a wildly lyrical euphemism for steak and chips - or as near to steak and chips as makes no difference. At least it was there. Phew. (As it happens, I wasn't, on that occasion, the paying husband, but that's not the point.)
Anyway, after a lot of palaver it arrived. And it was everything it ought to have been. But then the paying-husband option always is. When the maitre d', a balding spiv, approached to ask "How was it?" I had no difficulty in saying: "Grand, thanks." And it was grand, thanks. When, 10 minutes later, he returned and, with the same scissors-like smile, again asked "How was it?" I managed to say: "Grand, thanks." Again.
From then on, every time he made the slightest move, indicating that he was going to leave his post beside the infusion-table-cum-altar and do a lap of honour around the diningroom, I braced myself to say "Grand, thanks" again, managing all the while to stay calm by listening to my true, more incisive, but all too cowardly voice, which was itching to say: "Listen, buddy, I came here for dinner, not a colonoscopy."
This ghoulish monitoring of food as it progresses through customers' digestive systems is, with your-call-is-valuable-to-us Muzak, among the worst tyrannies imposed on consumers. It is one of a range of we-care procedures advocated by service-industry gurus.
The most recent of these practices, sprung on me at an awards ceremony in a swish D4 hotel, must have been as oppressive for the unfortunate waiter as it was for the customers. Here's what happened. I pulled my chair out and sat at the table. A hand shot in from the right and snapped up my napkin. I looked around. An Asian waiter smiled. He needed the napkin, I assumed, for some emergency. Perhaps something had spilled. Still smiling, he flicked it out of its elaborate cone.
Deftly, he joined two corners together to form a pre-Pampers nappy. He slipped one hand in just below the belt of my trousers. He slipped the other - the one gripping the napkin - in at the far side, linking the two together, caringly spreading the napkin. He then pulled both ends, to ensure it wouldn't slip off, patted the ruffles, then, to my immeasurable relief, moved on to do the same to the person beside me.
Did he think I was incontinent? Or, nearer the bone, too old or overweight to put my napkin on my lap by myself? No. It was diningroom policy. The same thing was going on at every table.
Where have they gone, those truculent, sturdy-armed mammy waitresses who ruled function rooms until the mid 1990s? They usually travelled in pairs. One would shove your head out of the way to land a scoop of mash on the plate while her nattering friend, advancing from the other direction, would manoeuvre an entree dish past your ear to pour the last of the mushy Brussels sprouts on to the mash.
Today the nation might well recoil from such an unsophisticated carry-on, but, equally, it might ask if the pendulum has swung ludicrously far in the opposite direction, with several hundred people, in a diningroom sagging with chandeliers, having nappies put on by hordes of foreign workers. Céad míle fáilte, how are you?
• James Ryan is a novelist. His most recent book is Seeds of Doubt