I AM back again in my own study amid the familiar clutter, the dusty dishevelment of all my own things. The pile of books almost falling off the edge of my desk is still there, and still almost falling. The pipes are still half in and half out of their pipe racks; the guitar, unplayed and neglected, still leans precariously against one of the bookshelves; the piles of letters and papers on various surfaces are still as haphazard and, alas, as unattended as ever.

What a relief! Travel is always a mixture of pleasures and perils, of impressions and oppressions, and sometimes it is the very things that are supposed to impress you or give you pleasure which are the most oppressive. Thus, it is the clean and tidy surfaces, the flawless, sterile neatness of all my nearly identical hotel rooms, which oppresses me and emphasises the loneliness of travel. All trace of the previous occupant has been removed from the room; there is not so much as a discarded envelope to humanise the place. It all seems somehow clinically empty, featureless, anonymous: a placeless place, in which you can be nothing but lonely.

But this anonymity cannot be true. This particular hotel room, doubtless, has a rich history. It is a place of intersection. The life stories of so many unique and vulnerable individuals all crossed over one another here. This room must have witnessed so many moments of reflection, moments of decision and indecision. Did one occupant of this room lie awake, reflecting on the futility of his work, and decide suddenly to change the course of his life? Did another make the phone call or send the text that ended or began a relationship? Did someone, in desperation, take out the Bible from the desk drawer and find, as they read it through the small hours, that it was reading them, piercing to the division of joint and marrow?

There should be a convention that every hotel room has a guest book, not for a signature followed by no content, but for frank autobiography, or even confession, followed by no signature. “We stayed here for our daughter’s wedding, still asking ‘Has she made the right choice?”. . . “Our board meeting chose today to ‘let go’ a hundred employees, my neighbours will be among them.” . . . “I am an English poet watching helplessly with my American friends as their government dismantles everything America once stood for. . .”

For a day or two, I humanise my hotel room with clutter, with the annotated handouts for the talks that I am giving, with the poetry books from which I will be reading, and with the glossy new books that I have been given by their eager authors. I am tempted to plant scraps of half-written poems under cushions or pillows, as a sign of humanity to the next occupant; but I know that they’ll be found and removed.

So, I return with relief to my own storied room, and read and remember all the little things that its clutter has to tell me, “gleaning the unsaid off the palpable”, as Seamus Heaney says. And the one thing in common that every object in all that varied clutter says to me is “Welcome home!”