Russian luxury
Alex James 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. That would be a proper breakaway, and I'd have to leave myself at the door, which is the one thing you can't do when you can have whatever you want; which is what all the fancy places promise. I think the most memorable hotel I've ever stayed in had no electricity, just candlelight: Hotel Tangaro in Essaouira on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. There was no need to look at the prices there. Actually, I find it's best not to look at the prices when staying anywhere expensive, either. It's best to work out how much it's going to cost before getting there, multiply by three and worry about it before leaving rather than letting it spoil the holiday.
I'm not complaining — I'd been staying at army bases in Colombia and I was ready for some starched linen and petits fours. I sat down at breakfast in the Davidoff restaurant, one of several in the hotel. That really is the mark of a fantastic hotel — whether they can do a good breakfast. Hmm, only red caviar. How disappointing. I lit a cigarette and leaned back into the banquette, balancing one foot on top of the other on outstretched legs, forgetting my woes.
'I'm a idiot,' said the man next to me. He was picking up the menu and putting it down again, in a certain amount of anguish, clearly not caviar-related. I offered him a cigarette. He broke off the filter and wedged the stub into his mouth so that only an inch poked out. He lit it and took an enormous gulp. People just don't smoke like that anywhere else I've been. Everything was so Russian and delicious, all of a sudden. I was having a first-class chance encounter. He told me his story. He lived over the road and he'd got toasted in the bar the night before and checked into a suite with a girl. The girl arrived. She was beautiful and he was smiling again.
That's what's good about these places. People want things to happen when they go to the bar in the best hotel in town, and things do. They're happening there right now. I hadn't been aware of this guy's presence, but the bar had been packed and everyone I talked to had a story. There was the guy who wrote the songs for Sisters of Mercy, who at one time were my favourite band. He runs a language school now and happened to be in St P. on business. There was a Russian classical composer holding court, too, and half of the British Council was there. One of the girls who'd invited us to her presidential suite the night before was getting jiggy with one of them. There was a lot of electricity, I suppose. Luxury recedes at the speed of light. As soon as you can feel its gentle caress for sure, you need to increase the dose. The best thing about luxury isn't luxury itself. It's the people that go there that make it so nice. Go on, be a devil.
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