It’s suite dreams that are keeping me going

WHAT ARE YOU most looking forward to postlockdown? Travel, ballet and restaurants do it for me but there is one particular pleasure we have been denied over the last year – the joy of hotels.

There is something about staying in one that nothing else can match. It’s the sense that you could be anyone in a hotel: yes, they’ll take your credit card and make sure you’ll be good for payment, but they still can’t be totally sure you are who you say you are. You could be a secret agent with multiple identities or a member of a royal family hiding out from revolutionaries. OK, so you’re plain old Virginia Blackburn from west London, but the point is, you might not be. I am not alone in loving hotels: some of them, such as Raffles in Singapore, attain legendary status. Others, such as the Gritti Palace in destinations in their

Venice are own right.

Experiences in hotels can shape you: I still remember the Cape Grace in Cape Town, which had a selection of different milks in the minibar (and is there anything better than raiding a minibar? A midnight feast for grown-ups), including soy, which I have drunk ever since.

Years ago I stayed at the Saint Géran in Mauritius and discovered in my room they had a menu – for pillows. And there was a personal butler on hand.

But hotels don’t need to be grand to be wonderful. I’ve stayed in some delightful little bijoux places in Paris, although a hotel would have to work quite hard not to be stylish in that city.

I was once housed in possibly the most elegant garret in the world, which was taken up almost entirely by a huge bed and a television that, courtesy of an arm attachment, followed you around the room.

And you can have strange experiences there. I once witnessed a fight between skinheads, from the Taschenberg Palace in Dresden, which provided the unusual experience of seeing ructions involving modern day thugs from the vantage point of an 18th century aristocrat.

SOME HOTELS, like the Chelsea in New York, became famous for their guests and bad behaviour – Arthur C Clark wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey when he was there and it is where Dylan Thomas started the illness that killed him. Allen Ginsberg was a long term resident.

But my favourite hotel story is closer to home. The actor Richard Harris lived in one of the most glamorous hotels in the world, The Savoy in London, and it was there that he, too, began his last journey and had to be taken out through the foyer on a stretcher.

Fellow guests goggled and Harris managed one last carouse. He hoisted himself up. “It’s the food!” he cried.