MORE ABOUT HOTEL FUGGER

If there is one thing we at Hotel Fugger take pride in it is nothing at all. We at Hotel Fugger know we have nothing to be proud of but that's OK because we're not proud people.

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You will love the food at Hotel Fugger because there isn't much of it so if you get your hands on it you will really value it. That is why we say that you will love the food at Hotel Fugger.

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Do not drink the water at Hotel Fugger. It tastes bad. It all comes from the tank on the roof. There are dead bodies in the tank. We don't know how the bodies got in there as the tank's only aperture has a  diameter of nine inches. However, a suicidal troupe of contortionists from the Chinese State Circus were reported missing five years ago and it was around about that time that Hotel Fugger's water started to taste bad.

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Many famous personalities stayed at Hotel Fugger but all of these famous personalities are dead and all of them died in Hotel Fugger. The circumstances of their deaths are considered so grim that no one talks about these famous personalities anymore. Hence, they are no longer famous.

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When you book into Hotel Fugger we give you the directions to your room. 'It's at the end of the corridor', we say and you walk down the corridor toward the end but there is no end. The corridor just goes on and on and on and on and on. Eventually you give up and turn back. Then you realise that the corridor has no start either. There is just corridor, stretching out in both directions, forever. Doorless corridor. Endless corridor. The last corridor you will ever see. The corridor you will die in. This corridor is our little joke. We have to keep ourselves amused somehow. It's just something to lighten the mood here at Hotel Fugger. 

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At Hotel Fugger we have face painting for the children but the children are all dead and the people painting their faces are the people who killed them. If it's any consolation, the face being painted on the children's faces is your face.

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Hotel Fugger is heated by the collective unease of its guests.

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The Devil came to stay at Hotel Fugger but was told there was only one bed left and that he'd have to share a room. The Devil agreed and we put him in a room with God. We locked the door from the outside and the two of them are trapped there to this day. If you put your ear to the door and listen you can hear the two of them arguing. Things can get pretty bitchy. Listening at their door is one of the chief attractions at Hotel Fugger.

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A guest recently found a finger in his bed at Hotel Fugger. It turned out that it was his own finger and there was nothing to worry about because it was still attached to his hand. The guest thought he'd report it anyway because, as the guest said himself, 'you never know' and that is very true, you never do know. In fact, that is our motto here at Hotel Fugger. 'YOU NEVER KNOW.' You find those words on the heading of our stationary, embroidered into our towels and on the plaque that hangs over our entrance. These words are also written in the minds of our staff and guests alike, in letters standing one mile high and made from the bones of the hundreds of millions of men, women and children who died with the words 'you never know' on their lips.

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Hotel Fugger has been completely refurbished. To be precise, Hotel Fugger has been utterly unfurbished. There are no longer walls at Hotel Fugger. Hotel Fugger no longer has doors or furnishings of any sort or even a roof. Hotel Fugger is just an idea. Hotel Fugger is not a good idea but it is an idea and you are stuck with the idea because I've just placed the idea of Hotel Fugger in your head.

Hotel Fugger – you're there right now.

Enjoy your stay.

You Never Know.

HOTEL FUGGER

Did I ever tell you that Hotel Fugger was once called The Hotel View Hotel? Yeah, it was. The old name came from the fact that every window in the hotel looked out onto another part of the hotel. The architecture was inspired by Bentham's Panopticon - no matter where you are you can be seen so you better watch what you're doing because someone might be looking. This was originally intended to prevent the theft of towels but the approach soon grew into a philosophy of sorts or, to be more precise, a way of 'being'. The Hotel View Hotel was considered a true escape from the world outside. Once booked in, the guests were encouraged to forget about everything beyond the lobby's revolving doors. House rules requested that conversation solely concern matters pertaining to the hotel: the evening's menu, gossip about other guests, the beige furnishings, the stale aroma, the mangy cat, the lack of toilet rolls and so on. To discuss the world outside the hotel risked inviting disapproving glances, mockery or even being sent to Coventry.

All books and periodicals were confiscated so as to prevent the residents being distracted from the residence. There was only the hotel - the stars and sun and birds and trees, the clouds and continents and constructs of the outside world vanished from the consciousness of the guests. The guests stopped contacting the friends and family they had known before their stay at The Hotel View Hotel. They quit their professions. They earned their keep by working in the hotel.

Soon all the exits to the building were sealed up. The only doors remaining were ones that led back in, which didn't bother anyone because no one ever left. And so things continued for a time and everyone was perfectly happy. Well, not 'happy' maybe but content or at least contentish. Well, they were prepared to pretend they were contentish, let's just put it that way. So, you know, it was as good a life as anyone might expect to live and that was about as good a life as anyone expected. That is until the food shortage. That's right, the kitchen ran out of food. Well, it was bound to happen wasn't it? The guests/staff had even discussed it. A concerned receptionist actually gave a presentation about it in the function room. Our Incommodious Future, that's what she called her lecture. Everyone listened and worried but no one did anything. I mean, what could they do? Well, one guy suggested they leave the hotel and go to the shops but he was dismissed as a crank. 'We'll eat the potted plants instead', they said and they did until there were no plants and then someone proposed that they eat the stationary and they did until that was all gobbled up and finally they decided to eat toothpaste and soap and stuff like that and that's how they were found - curled up, emaciated and blue, gobs afroth with mixed toiletries.

So anyway, I got the place for cheap. No one wanted to buy a sealed off multi-chambered mausoleum so I bought it for next to nothing, renamed it and reopened its doors. There's a weird vibe here I admit. A lot of dead prayers got buried in these walls. Things are heard at night. The mangy cat is sometimes seen. Some of the people that come to stay are purely here in the hopes of experiencing something grim or even spectral – expecting the dead to provide a new perspective on life. Most of my guests are just here for the cheap rooms though. They aren't fussy. They don't notice the heavy atmosphere because similar fugs have enveloped them their entire lives. They are the lost and the wounded. Sometimes they are those that seek to wound the lost. Sometimes they are the lost who unintentionally wound others. Last night a guest jumped to her death from an upper floor window and landed on another guest, a murderer returning from a night's kill. Weird eh? Barely a morning passes when we don't find an auto-asphyxiated onanist dangling in a wardrobe or a broken necked drunk crumpled at the bottom of a stairwell. I'm fair about it. I warn people before they book in. They book in anyway. I think it's the irresistible draw of defeat. A fatalistic surrender to a self-destined doom. Or maybe it's the ultimate protest against the sheer effort required to imagine things turning out some other way. Either way, the guests of Hotel Fugger consider that there's no other way.

You'll find a skull in the minibar and see a corpse in the mirror. The shower curtain is a sheet of human epidermis. The flowers are plastic but they're all dead anyway. A single room is only twelve fifty. Leave a tip near your cold stiff body.

Right so, now that that's done, I think we'll have a bit of a tune will we? We will, we'll have a song...