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It is safe to say that readers of Condé Nast Traveller and the Sunday Times Travel Supplement will never be troubled by a review of the Holiday Inn Reading M4 Junction 10. Its name will never appear beside Le Sirenuse or the Gritti Palace in lists of the world’s most opulent hotels. The aroma of the bougainvillea does not waft across the underground car-park, not can you sit on your balcony sipping a glass of Frangelico as you watch straw-hatted gondolieri ply their centuries-old trade along the Grand Canal. Instead you get a view of a business park outside Reading.

And yet the HIM4J10 (as we aficionados call it) is really a very good hotel. A few of the staff are Indian, which means you can get a really good Chicken Jalfrezi until 11 p.m. — something you won’t find at the Georges V in Paris. And, at the weekend, you can get a pretty nifty room for £55. Adjacent rooms have interconnecting doors, meaning you can protect your children from the predations of public-service broadcasters. There’s also a good indoor swimming pool which guests can use for free (a pleasant change from the Hotel Martinez in Cannes, where the rapacious scoundrels charge guests for using the hotel’s own beach).

One day someone should write a book celebrating the best hotels travel journalists never mention. Travel journalism, in my view (Simon Calder is one exception) is becoming increasingly surreal. I cannot imagine an occasion in any hotel when I want someone to place a row of hot pebbles along my naked back. What I do want is a bed, a coffee-maker, a bit of Wi-Fi, a loo, a few horizontal surfaces and too many power points to count.