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The Art of Hermiting

The Art of Hermiting

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 “It's love,” my music teacher assured us, “that makes the world go round.” He was trying to enforce some degree of harmony in the class at the time, burdened by having to learn yet another Mikado song. He might have cheered us all up had he shared W. S. Gilbert’s other great insight: “Man is nature's sole mistake”.But this he failed to do and so, aged 12, I was left wondering just how on earth the world would motor itself forward, and go round and round, given the unhelpful existence of such hermits as myself. Of course, hermits often love, but given their predictably sequestered impact, the effect is like being licked by a gerbil. Not enough to really help the world go round and round. And round.Quite how I got away with it, being brought up in a country then so explosively fecund that the Prime Minister’s younger son set about furtively and forcibly sterilizing any male within sight, was itself a miracle. Of course, he failed. Utterly. In the ten years from my arriving in India and then leaving it, the population jumped 100 million. And not just there. Everywhere. More and more people, making the world go round, with love. The battalions of shrinks who spent so much effect making me into the balanced, burnished, and pleasing figure that I am today, never really explained what happened when or why to make me so. But hermiting, to coin verb, is a very pleasing occupation. And I am certainly getting better at it.It was a challenge to do well in India, at boarding school, university or in any of the vortex-inducing publishing houses that greedily besotted me during an early career enthusiasm. But here, in the jungles of central Sri Lanka, it works much better.The path of a hermit is rarely straightforward, especially if you are the sort that prefers looking upon caves, lighthouses, and abandoned windswept islands, rather than living in them. Why, after all, should hermitting be shorn of books, champagne, a good chef, or opera? Not everyone is St Paul, content with dates and bread, or likes dining off leather shoes, like the Siberian hermit Agafia Lykova.Clearly there are degrees in hermiting, as in any condition or occupation - though my friends still chuckle and snigger at my career choice to run a hotel. That, they claim, is merely a perverse attempt to have ones cake and eat it. For, of course, you can’t hermit 24/7 in a hotel. In a hotel hermitting is intermittent. Like the building of Rome, it cannot be achieved in a full day. There are guests to greet, help, welcome and part with. Suppliers of everything from diesel to devilled cashews to meet. An unending parade of plumbers, electricians, garbage collectors, Wi-Fi repairers, gar deliverers dancing up the estate road in duets with government agents, tuk tuks, lost policemen, cinnamon peelers, monkeys and falling mangos.But all of this misses that one essential point: hotels nurture hermiting. Ravi Shankar, Coco Chanel, Clinty Eastwood all lived in hotels. And look at what they achieved. “When you get into a hotel room,” noted Diane von Furstenberg, “you lock the door, and you know there is a secrecy, there is a luxury, there is fantasy. There is comfort. There is reassurance.” Amongst well-informed hermits, arguments rage gently over what type of hotel offers the best hermiting. And at first glance you would seemed utterly spoiled for choice here in Sri Lanka. It lists over 10,000 places as providing accommodation. However, closer inspection shows that just a quarter of these places are classified as hotels And of those just 8% (200) are rated as 5-star. For a small island still greatly overlooked by international visitors who are more accustomed to visit Thailand, the Maldives or India, this may seem more than sufficient – but most of these 200 hotels are small private operations - authentically boutique in a world that has heartlessly commoditized the word. Thankfully, the hotel chains that dominate the rest of the world – Taj, Sheraton, Marriot, Starwood, Meridian, etc. – have yet to put in much of an appearance here. Even so, as tourism roves forward on its somewhat uneven upward trajectory, local chains – such as Jetwing, Cinnamon, Resplendent, Tangerine, Teardrop, Taru and Uga - are developing a growing reputation for exceptional hospitality. My Colombo hermitage of choice is the Colombo Court Hotel & Spa, a much overlooked habitat of calm sitting just off the traffic jam that is Duplication Road. Alternatively, Tintagel offers unquestionable peace, a far cry from its 1956 tabloid moment when the radical Prime Minster S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, seated on its veranda, was shot dead by a Buddhist priest whose business affairs had gone awry - the first leader of the modern state to be murdered – but not the last. For those who prefer Colombo hermitting in massive edifices, there is Cinnamon Grand; the Hilton, one of the first globally branded ...

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