stolen from todays Times Online:We all know what businessmen’s hotels are like. There’s a priority check-in section where you wait behind some rope, on a bit of carpet. There are staff in shiny suits who say things like “If there’s anything else at all for yourself at all”. And you are given a credit card key that makes lots of whirring noises when you put it in the lock but will not, no matter what you do, open the door. After you’ve kicked it down, you have the room. There’s no obvious button to turn off the fan, which sounds like a Foxbat jet. The light switch by the bed turns all the lights off, except one. Which can only be extinguished by hitting the bulb with your shoe. The plug you need to charge your mobile is always behind the mini bar, and the “tea and coffee making facilities” are designed to ensure you can’t make either. No, really: the kettle lead is never more than a foot long and the brown powder they put in the sachets is way closer on the periodic table to radium F than it is to coffee. The restaurant, furnished in beige, is overseen by a woman who says: “Can I get any bread items for yourself at all, sir?” and then hands you over to a 14-year-old Latvian girl who arrived in Britain that morning on the underside of a Eurostar train. Beer is not a word she’s familiar with, which is annoying because it’s what you want most of all in the world. Your fellow diners are chomping their way through their suppers, some reading books, some newspapers, and there’s always one whose reading the hotel’s smoking policy leaflet over and over again. Just killing time till they can go to their room and watch pornography. Businessmen’s hotels, I think, are the most miserable, soul destroying, soulless, energy sapping, embarrassing, badly run and badly organised edifices in the entire world. I’d rather stay in an igloo. And that’s before we get to the food. The menus are always written in a massively squiggly, curly-whirly typeface. And there’s much talk of jus and things being drizzled onto other things. But you know the chef is not from Paris or Rome. He’s from Darlington and he hasn’t a clue what he’s doing
