It was January. I was living in a tiny flat in central London. I was also trying to write a book. The weather was dismal, the manuscript was overdue and I was stuck. Badly stuck. And I hadn't a clue how to become unstuck. Worst of all, the lease on my flat had run out and I was going to have to move. The thought of trailing around London in the drizzle to look for another shoebox to rent was more than I could bear.
Then I discovered something. I discovered it was cheaper to live in a hotel in southern France than it was to rent another flat in London. And not just a little cheaper, but quite a lot cheaper. For a few hours, I cheered myself up with daydreams of olive groves and vineyards, of winter sunshine and flocks of flamingos. I pictured myself eating breakfast in splendid surroundings while someone else cleaned my room. I imagined what it would be like to have nothing to think about except the book.
But I could scarcely stammer "je m'appelle Olivia," never mind explain that I wanted to take a room for several weeks. Besides, who lives in hotels? When I was a child, my great aunt had a friend who lived in hotels-autumns and winters in Zurich (or was it Lausanne?), springs in London and summers in Bermuda. But the friend was rich and eccentric, and it was plain to the little-girl-me that those two factors accounted for her choice of abode. I was neither eccentric (well, not very) nor rich. Then again, if hotels were cheaper than flats, perhaps I'd got things wrong. Maybe renting flats in London was for the rich and eccentric, and living in foreign hotels was for people like me. I had, of course, heard of writers living in hotels. However, they were all, as far as I knew, novelists or travel writers and, presumably, needed a minimum of paraphernalia. I was writing a fact-intensive book about the sex lives of animals and, to make progress, would need platoons of books and papers. No, the whole notion was patently absurd. Or was it?
A few years earlier and by chance, I'd stayed a night in a hotel in a small town not far from Montpellier. I vaguely recalled that the hotel had had large, quiet, sunny rooms-just the thing for a depressed writer suffering from writer's block and the English winter. What on earth was the name of the place? Ah yes, on a scrap of paper, I'd written "H?tel de l'Orange, Sommi?res." What the hell, I thought. If it's ghastly, I can always come back. So with the help of a friend, I composed a fax to the hotel's proprietor and booked myself in for six weeks; with the help of several other friends, I packed up my flat. I loaded all of my books and papers, my laptop, and a small suitcase of clothes into the car, and drove away.
The gamble paid off. Within hours of arrival, my mood lifted; within days, the writer's block was cured. This isn't to say that things always went smoothly. I started by scrapping everything I'd written up to then, and it was no accident that the first phrase I learned to say after I arrived was "je m'arrache les cheveux"-"I'm tearing my hair." (I think this must be a stronger expression in French than it is in English: whenever I said it, people would look at me with alarm and reassure me that my hair was growing back.) Nevertheless, I finally began to make progress, and at the end of the six weeks, I asked to stay for another month; at the end of that month, I asked to stay for still another. By the time I finally left-in the middle of May-I'd solved all of the conceptual and structural problems of the book, I'd found the tone I wanted and I'd completed a large chunk of the manuscript.
I was lucky. The hotel turned out to be even better than I'd remembered. It's in a beautiful and tranquil spot-Sommi?res is a slightly crumbling medieval town (complete with Roman bridge) set between a river and a steep hill. I later learned that I wasn't the first writer to have found it inspiring: Lawrence Durrell lived in Sommi?res for many years.
Then, there's the hotel itself. What is now the H?tel de l'Orange was, in the 17th century, an "h?tel particulier"-a nobleman's townhouse-with stone walls two feet thick. Next to the church in the centre of the old town, it is built into the hillside, a feature that gives the hotel a large part of its unusual charm: a series of terraced gardens and a grand view over the rooftops. Breakfast is indeed served in splendid surroundings, and the bedrooms (of which there are only eight) are huge. The one I was given had sun streaming in from early morning to late evening. And it really is quiet. The streets of Sommi?res are too narrow for cars, so during the day the only sounds I could hear were pigeons cooing, children playing, and an occasional hymn from the church.
Philippe de Fr?mont, the proprietor, is a warm and generous host who makes his own jam, often gives dinner parties and who found it entertaining to help me learn French. In short, he and his family couldn't have been more welcoming or encouraging; meeting them was the biggest stroke of luck of all.
I wouldn't want to live in a hotel for ever. However nice it is, in the end it isn't home. But as a cure for writer's block-well, I can't recommend anything more invigorating than a beautiful, small, quiet hotel.
