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There can be few literary works in any language as poetic as a room-service menu.

The autumn blast

Blows along the stones

On Mount Asama

Even these lines by Matsuo Bashō, who brought the haiku form to its mature perfection in the Edo era in Japan, seemed flat and unevocative next to the verse composed by the anonymous master at work somewhere within the Sofitel’s catering operation:

Delicate field greens with sun-dried cranberries,

Poached pears, Gorgonzola cheese

And candied walnuts in a Zinfandel vinaigrette

I reflected on the difficulty faced by the kitchen of correctly interpreting the likelihood of selling some of the remoter items of the menu: how many out of the guests in the lift industry, for example, might be tempted by the ‘Atlantic snapper, enhanced with lemon pepper seasoning atop a chunky mango relish’, or by the always mysterious and somewhat melancholy-sounding ‘Chef’s soup of the day’. But perhaps, in the end, there was no particular science to the calibration of alimentary supplies, for it is rare to spend an evening in a hotel and order anything other than a club sandwich, which even Bashō, at the peak of his powers, would have struggled to describe as convincingly as the menu’s scribe:

Warm grilled chicken slices,

Smoked bacon, crisp lettuce,

And a warm ciabatta roll on a bed of sea-salted fries

There was a knock at the door only twenty minutes after I had dialled nine and put in my order. It is a strange moment when two adult men meet each other, one naked save for a complimentary dressing gown, the other (newly arrived in England from the small Estonian town of Rakvere and sharing a room with four others in nearby Hillingdon) sporting a black and white uniform, with an apron and a name badge. It is difficult to think of the ritual as entirely unremarkable, to say in a casually impatient voice, ‘By the television, please,’ while pretending to rearrange papers – though this capacity can be counted upon to evolve with more frequent attendance at global conferences.

I had dinner with Chloe Cho, formerly with Channel NewsAsia but now working for CNBC in Singapore. She updated me on the regional markets and Samsung’s quarterly forecast, but her sustained focus was on commodities. I wondered what Chloe’s outside interests might be. She was like a sister of the Carmelite Order, behind whose austere headdress and concentrated expression one could just guess at occasional moments of doubt, rendered all the more intriguing by their emphatic denial. On a ticker tape running across the bottom of the screen, I spotted the share price of my employer, pointed on a downward trajectory.

After dinner, it was still warm and not yet quite dark outside. I would have liked to take a walk around one of the few fields that remained of the farmland on which the airport had been built some six decades before, but it seemed at once perilous and impossible to leave the building, so I decided to do a few circuits around the hotel corridors instead. Feeling disoriented and queasy, as if I were on a cruise ship in a swell, I repeatedly had to steady myself against the synthetic walls. Along my route, I passed dozens of room-service trays much like my own, each one furtively pushed into the hallway and nearly all (once their stainless-steel covers were lifted) providing evidence of orgiastic episodes of consumption. Ketchup smeared across slices of toast and fried eggs dipped in vinaigrette spoke of the breaking of taboos just like the sexual ones more often assumed to be breached during solitary residence in hotel rooms.

I fell asleep at eleven, but woke up again abruptly just past three. The prehistoric part of the mind, trained to listen for and interpret every shriek in the trees, was still doing its work, latching on to the slamming of doors and the flushing of toilets in unknown precincts of the building. The hotel and terminal seemed like a giant machine poised in standby mode, emitting an uncanny hum from a phalanx