Errata

Marvin is in his early-to-mid twenties and hails from Canada. Last night – at around quarter-to-five or so in the morning – he returned noisily from a night spent on the town and engaged in enthusiastic sexual proclivities with a brunette Irish woman whose name was either Annie, Alice or Baby Doll, all three of which were used, and none of which were corrected.
I know all of this because Marvin’s bed is approximately half-a-metre from my own and thus, I hereby retract anything positive I might have said about this particular dormitory having now discovered that the reasoning behind the absence of one of the odours which I painstakingly listed in an earlier post is essentially because it is not actually stale yet.
I should admit that Marvin is probably not actually called Marvin, or at least I do not think he is. We have never been formally introduced and the nearest I have managed to conversing with him has been his tendency to talk past me to a friend of his on the bed on the other side of the room. A conversational version of “piggy in the middle” if you like, into which I would attempt to grab at the passing conversation as it passed and start a volley of my own.
Either way, he strikes me as a Marvin, so it will do for the purposes of this anecdote.
His other friend arrived back from the pub at the same time of about half-past four in the morning and was out of the room during the evening’s performance, but when he returned later in the morning, he began a rather extraordinary speech which I can only paraphrase here:
“I was in the kitchen,” he began, “Making my dinner when that blonde woman from room ten came in. I don’t know what her name is, but she’s got curly hair, right? Anyway she starts complaining that I’m making all this noise and that I’m crashing and stamping and smashing things. And she says that she ‘wants to sleep’.”
This last quote is delivered in a hoarse falsetto, presumably for comic effect. No one laughs and he sighs.
“She was so rude.” He protests in disbelief, “I was so angry it was all I could do to keep making dinner. So rude.”
A brief and merciful silence follows and when he gets no response, he adds in a tone so petulant that it’s almost moving:
“She drives a really rubbish VW golf with a broken back window. I really hope it breaks down.”

I should, I appreciate, be thankful that it has taken so long. I’ve been in hostel dormitory’s inhabited by mewlers, pukers, interior designers, drunks and masturbators, but until last night, had only marvelled in horror at the anecdotes I had been told by other travellers about the evenings during which they had been forced to bare witness to various acts of communal-living coitus on top bunks, bottom bunks, lounges and laundries.
Judith, from the West Coast tour recounted a particularly memorable variant on the tale which happened in New South Wales. A couple returned to the dormitory and thinking that it was empty (which is, I suppose, an improvement on Marv and company) started at it on the floor in the centre of the room between the bunk beds where the hostel manager had ill advisedly laid a thick pile rug which evidently looked more comfortable than the beds themselves.
Of course the room was not unoccupied and Judith and an English girl found they had become unexpected voyeurs until Judith cleared her throat significantly to indicate her presence. The couple were mortified (also a plus) and fled the scene leaving Judith and the English girl exchanging the usual oh-my-god-did-you-see-that? sort of conversation. Bonded in disgust, the English girl then ruined everything with the startled – and startlingly irony free – exclamation of:
“I mean, what do they think the bathroom is there for?”

So consider my trying-to-sleep-while-others-are-shagging-in-the-dorm cherry well and truly popped, and with it, I have now seen my fill of legal but questionable doings in dorms and thus never have to stay in one again forever and ever and ever until the next time. Until then, I’m going to try and find a single room to hole up in now that I have a job to pay for it.
As for Marvin and Annie, well borrowing a little of the petulance from his friend, I wish them well and hope that their second date will be in the waiting room of a certain clinic (ironically, and I really am not making this up, situated at the end of a woodland path named ‘Lover’s Lane’). Harsh I know, but that’s what you get for waking up someone with a seven o’clock alarm call followed by the promise of nine hours soul destroying filing work in a gloomy basement.
You have been warned.