T A B L E_T A L K What are your favorite wilderness and park areas? Rhapsodize on the topic of their splendor in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The Deep Fried Potato Bug By Richard Sterling An American challenges a Frenchman to a culinary duel (09/02/98) Camel Trophy's grand finale By Melanie D. Goldman Haircuts and kissing games at the end of the world (09/01/98) When tempers fly By Dawn MacKeen How should airlines deal with unruly passengers? British Airways is going to "yellow card" them (08/31/98) Burning love By Gale Walden Elvis devotees and wannabes gather in Memphis (08/28/98) Angela, the Upside-Down Girl By Emily Hiestand First encounters with Boston -- and with a stripper extraordinaire named Angela (08/27/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		C O N F E S S I O N S _ O F _ A hoteloholic A lifelong traveler reveals her addiction to the theater and ritual of grand hotels. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY JAN MORRIS | There are some psychological disorders that one prefers to keep to oneself, but after decades of concealment I have decided to make a public confession of my own deviant condition: I am a lifelong hoteloholic -- one who suffers from an uncontrollable and incurable craving for expensive hotels. Of course my friends have noticed odd symptoms down the years -- Why do I never accept invitations to stay with them on my travels? Why are my bathroom drawers full of unwrapped soap cakes from Mandarins, Regents and Palaces around the world? -- but nobody except a fellow sufferer can appreciate the depth and complexity of the neurosis. Like most addictions, it is full of pleasure -- and like most neurotics, I feel I have it in hand. I consider it a branch of art appreciation, but of a particularly subtle, interactive kind, for in my view a hotel and its guests are engaged in a kind of minuet of mutual inference, each responding to the other's vibes and gestures -- a little like the mating dances of exotic birds, as they strut and preen about one another, lasciviously grunting. Before he takes a sip, the alcoholic sniffs the bouquet of his claret or eyes the color of his malt whiskey. I get my preliminary frisson simply by walking through the revolving door of a hotel. It may be the sort of hotel where a young woman in a tailored blouse offers a sickly training-school smile and says in a phony accent, "Good evening, how may I assist you?" Or it may be the sort where a fawning assistant manager in a dinner jacket comes intensely bustling across the lobby -- he has been so looking forward to seeing you ever since he noticed your name in the reservation book, and he slips his visiting card into your hand just in case there is anything you need during your stay in Suite 111 (same old suite, you see!). Either way, it is performance art, and the practiced hotel addict responds in kind, instantly demanding non-smoking accommodation with discount as per special offers, or exclaiming "Giovanni, my dear, what a delight to see you again!" This is the touch of theater that is essential to the nature of expensive hotels. These people are play-acting, and are tacitly inviting people like me to join the cast. It is conceivable that I really have met Giovanni before (though more probably I have just snatched his name from a sly look at his card). Most people I meet in hotels, however, are total strangers to me, companions in illusion, and just as the hotel itself is living in perpetual pretense, so just for a day or two I may inhabit whatever character I fancy -- pompous or slinky, shady or respectable, dowdy or modest or flamboyant. For us addicts, staying in a hotel is joining a communal charade -- far more fun than accepting a bed in Clarissa's guest room and having a nice long chat after dinner. Oddly enough, too, the hotel can often seem more sympathetic, more collusive, than Clarissa and Simon's place, where I would also be obliged to admire the holiday photographs, drool over the baby, put up with bath water that is less than scalding and even, at worst, help with the washing-up. The hotel requires nothing of me (except hard cash or credit card), yet I have only to check in to feel that I have become a member. If it is one of the mammoth modern kind, perhaps on the top 20 floors of a skyscraper, I feel I have become a citizen of a private city. If it is smallish but trim, I feel I have joined the crew of a ship. And when I am taken upstairs in a creaky gilded elevator to my poky room high on the attic floor of some superannuated European chateau, I feel I am being welcomed into a family of aristocrats, if only as the upstairs maid. N E X T+P A G E | Love, hate and distrust