Russian luxury

The Astoria Hotel in St Petersburg is acknowledged by one and all to be the best hotel in town. This doesn’t seem to be a matter of opinion, taste or committee, so much as an unassailable truth. My wife mentioned that we were going to St Pete’s to our impossibly rich neighbours and they named it, without prompting. I suppose you know somewhere is probably going to be all right if George Bush has stayed there. Whatever else you may think of him, it’s hard to disagree with the most powerful man in the world’s position on hotels.

The thing about the world’s best hotels is of course that they are all annexes of one hotel, really. When we arrived, I realised I’d been to this hotel before, in Florence. It’s exactly the same. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where you are or even which one you’re in. Sometimes it’s small and cosy, sometimes there’s a vast lobby full of buttoned-ups and skirties; 12 pianists jangling, 11 harpists twangling and endless bars, brasseries and ballrooms, but it all seems to be unmistakeably part of the same place. The posh hotel is inevitably designed around impossibly rich men, so that they don’t have to stop working, and more and more to cater for their bored wives who need to be constantly caviared, massaged and manicured to alleviate the utter nausea of being somewhere briefly with a companion who’s absent.

The place I’ve most wanted to stay recently was actually a shack on a riverbank in the Colombian rainforest. It had no plumbing or electricity and an indeterminate number of people and chickens lived there, but it was nice, another world altogether. I was only passing and unfortunately there wasn’t time to linger there this time, but I’m definitely going back.