Postcard from... the Kelso Hotel

By Fiona M Jones:

I have seen these stairs in one of many dreams: old-carpeted and awkward, all in different directions and never a full flight together. Hardly a room shares floor with another as you climb a little, step down, turn to find yourself above an entryway or down in a strange narrow yard recently wooden-decked. You find yourself neither indoors nor outdoors between high white windowed walls, followed by an archway too low now for horse-drawn gig but surely never meant for a door.

In my dreams every building is like this: old and idiosyncratic, mazelike, defying rectangular expectation, atticked and cellared and easy to get lost in—as though in books or dreams or ancestry I lived in such places and can never quite get used to architecture that makes sense.

It comes almost as a surprise that the hotel rooms boast space and light and all mod cons, and ensuite shower and a huge TV. One single mid-ceiling beam leads me to wonder if this once stood as two smaller rooms. The corded-casement windows are the oldest feature inside, but younger than the building itself by two or three centuries at least.

Noise from the small hotel bar filters up through the floor, but Kelso is a quiet town and the mild revelry of its Saturday night dies down early. From the street below our casements the last late vehicles rattle over cobblestones before night deepens into peace. We are staying one night here in Kelso, and it is not enough. We have walked beside the river, visited one restaurant, sampled a local micro-bar—and already we start planning our return.

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Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.