Tap tap tap at the door. I opened my eyes. ‘Check-out 10.30,’ said a neutral or possibly slightly hostile female voice on the other side of the door. I looked at my phone. As I looked, the clock changed from 10.29 to 10.30. Then I heard what I perceived to be the irritated rustling of a large plastic bag and receding carpeted footfalls.
This wasn’t a hotel as such. It was a ‘club’ into which non-members like myself are welcomed and charged slightly more than members. I’d chosen it because it was called the Penn club, and it was in Bloomsbury, and I’d seen it advertised in the Times Literary Supplement, and, being densely stupid, or romantic, or both, I had imagined it to be some sort of a writer’s club. This misapprehension was reinforced by the website’s trumpeting that John Wyndham wrote The Day of the Triffids there.
But the cooler reality was that the club was named after William Penn, early Quaker, founder of Pennsylvania, and it was run on Quaker principles of honesty and simplicity and integrity.
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