Comedian Amy Matthews on how she grabs some time and meaning from her hectic life on the road

“Who am I tonight? My hotel room won’t remember me.” So begins the second verse of Neko Case’s bluesy, haunting dirge “Prison Girls”. It’s a line that sardonically chimes through my head as I open the door to my seventh lodging in as many days.

Being a stand-up comedian means a life of constant travel; a picaresque existence of flux and transit. In a random eight-month sample period, I pre-booked almost 230 trains and slept in countless different places. From friends’ sofas to narrowboats; budget hotels, to luxury suites; sleeper-trains to rooms above pubs; Airbnbs to literal cupboards under the stairs, I have called countless spaces home for the night. Living this way begs the question, how does one ever settle in a lifestyle built on being unsettled? How should I attempt to dwell while constantly being in motion? It requires very disciplined practice in the art of grounding – which for me means altar-building.

Whatever accommodation I end up in, even if I’m only there to crash for a matter of hours, the first thing I do is unpack my bags and build my altar. I’m aware that the word “altar” connotes something slightly grandiose, but it rarely is. By “altar” I mean a small, curated and intentional space, adorned with chosen objects, where I might sit and journal. A site-specific corner or ledge or table, where I can connect with the page in front of me or indulge in a moment of meditative recalibration.

I always build my altar before bed so that I might wake up to a ready-made site of grounding, rather than yet another unfamiliar four walls. This way, I have a portable sense of home. I can build a small arena of my personality into an alien space, in a way that honours both where I am now and where I’ve just been. Altar-building is my shortcut to orienting myself. My cheatcode to a sense of familiarity. My fast-track to settling into a new place, so that I might microdose a sense of stillness amidst relentless movement.

I build my altars with whatever I have to hand, in a way that feels congruent with the environment that I find myself in. For this reason, they are always different, but have consistent features.

Here’s my basic list of components for building a travelling altar*:

A View
Every altar needs a backdrop. Sometimes that is the rolling hills of Bakewell tumbling out in front of a mullioned window. Others it is the elephant-grey of a Birmingham carpark and some twitching petrol station lights. Or, if like one hotel in Stockholm there are no windows, I set up camp in front of the mirror and let the quietly textured tableaux of bed linens and my dishevelled, pyjamaed self reflect back at me.

A Focal Point or Centrepiece
An object that provides a focus. This has been a vase, or a postcard, or a book, or a crystal. Anything that gives the altar a guiding star or visual peg to hang a moment upon.

A Bit of Where I’ve Been
Something that honours where I’ve come from in order to arrive here. This could be a train ticket, or a souvenir from the day before, or simply my suitcase itself. Something that allows me to take stock and absorb yesterday’s experiences in today’s pause.

A Bit of Where I Am
This could be the room service menu, a key, a leaf from the tree outside or the teaspoon I stirred my coffee with a minute ago. A material synecdoche of the place I inhabit in that moment.

Something Natural
A representative of the natural world. A stone, a sprig of wildflower, a drop of algae-speckled lakewater (nature’s lava lamp). It doesn’t have to be as overtly verdant as any of these examples. Opening a window and inviting the breeze to sit with you, or acknowledging the little dribble of sunlight that’s seeped onto the desk also counts. As does a gemstone in your jewellery or the wood of your hairbrush.

Nourishment
Coffee in a takeaway cup from the barista downstairs, a tea made with the hotel kettle, or a masterfully mixed crystal-glassed Sazerac. A slightly dry flapjack nabbed in haste at a station, or, as happened in Bristol once, an apple gifted from another act’s garden that they kindly distributed in the greenroom the evening before. A dyed magenta egg featured on a particularly spectacular altar I assembled on the balcony in the Austrian alps. Though just as effective was the packaged shortbread in a Coventry Ibis. Anything that serves as a reminder that we deserve to be nourished.

A Smoking (or Steaming) Element
Now this is slightly harder. Lighting a candle in a hotel room is, of course, a finable offence. But where possible and safe, it elevates altar time to something anciently ceremonial. I have used incense at a friend’s house in Manchester, or a woodburner on a boat. A little hack: steam works in lieu of access to pyrotechnics. A hot drink works well for this – anything where vapour seems to reach upwards. It’s not only calming to watch but it’s a lovely visual reminder that things undergoing a dramatic change of state can transform and move with serenity.

Something Sensory
Anything that lights up at least one of your senses. This could be the introduction of a soundscape by popping on the radio, or – my favourite – some kind of olfactory component. Scent is the sense that I find most grounding and stimulating, to such an extreme that I even keep a list of smells in a designated notebook. Historically, this has ranged from pillow spray to dried damask rose, to supermarket kimchi.

A Page
This is the most crucial and non-negotiable element for me. Any form of page. A book to read, a magazine to peruse, a scrap receipt to scribble a to-do list on, or the comfortingly matte expanse of an empty notebook page on which to journal. I have to write daily, in the same way that I have to shower every day. It’s part of my creative and spiritual hygiene. Living in a state of continual sojourning, I pepper my days with moments of stillness by anchoring myself to the page at an altar – something I’ve playfully termed sojournalling (verb): the anchoring act of writing or journaling in stillness, amidst a dynamic and ever-changing schedule.

*Any one object may encapsulate a multitude of these elements. For instance, while staying in Brighton, a pebble from the beach provided a connection to the postcode, as well as being a token of the natural world, and a centrepiece. Similarly, while staying in a remote farmhouse in Machynlleth for the comedy festival there, a brew of nettle tea picked from the dewy grounds provided hydrating nourishment, olfactory delight and vaporous aerialists of swirling steam – all in a mug that I’d bought from a ceramicist in Hammersmith the week before. The tea was from the ground I was on in the present moment, held in a vessel from where I’d just been.

I’m of the opinion that it is a deeply human instinct to build altars, in the same way that we have a reflexive propensity to gaze at stars, dance to music or stare at fire. Altars are everywhere: the kitchen sink; the bedroom vanity unit; the tray table on a train; tool storage on a woodworking bench; the mantlepiece bracketing the fireplace. What are these things if not altars? Little trinketed stages that bring together a practical and symbolic assemblage of objects, so that we might honour the marvels of the everyday world and thereby situate ourselves within it.

Altar-building and sojournalling do not have to occur amid literal travel either. Whether you’re a roving clown like myself, or a semi-retired accountant who lives, works and sleeps within the same four walls, a sense of chaos and transience can happen within a very fixed geographical location. Life is fast, mercurial and hectic. It desperately requires us to be deliberate about building time and space to sit and connect with ourselves and our surroundings – to orient, observe, absorb and take pause of place and personhood.

Knowing how to build altars into our everyday is a transferable skill. It is an act of spatial and spiritual tethering. A pin in an unmapped corkboard. A comma in dense prose. Altars are cosmic and earthly confluences. They are invitations that the humdrum enthusiastically extends to its too-long-forgotten friends, Ceremony and Ritual.

A hotel room may not remember me, but an altar will help me remember myself.

This article appears in the current edition of the Idler.

“A Dink with the Idler”

Amy Matthews is our guest on this week’s “A Drink with the Idler”, where she’ll be talking about life travelling around on the comedy circuit. Expect insights on the differences between Gen Z and Millennials along the way.
Thursday 23 October, 6-7pm. Click here to book – it’s FREE to subscribers.

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