Staying at an amazing hotel in Amsterdam; the
Lloyd Hotel. It's dripping with creativity in its design and has a very dark history as an emigrant's hotel and a prison but what is most interesting for me is the smell. The corridors and stairwells cannot shake off that institutional smell of people. Having worked for many summers teaching English in private schools at Sutton Valence in Kent and Woodbridge in Suffolk, it takes me back to all those summers. I noticed too, how steep the stairs were, perhaps a style adopted to suit the tall but narrow Amsterdam houses.
