Alex James: The Great Escape

I've been staying in a hotel on the Watford ring road for the past few days and it's been raining for as long as I can remember: traffic groan and piffling muzak half fill the empty greyness of this netherland.

Watford looked rather nice. I glimpsed it briefly from a taxi window some time last week, but this ring road was never supposed to be a destination.

It's a bypass. This is about as horrible as a hotel could be. It's clean and there is shortcake and relaxing body lotion, but it's horrible – not just because it's completely missing the point of where it's supposed to be. It has not one defining quality. It's suffocating: Pure anaesthesia, in spite of the friendly staff.

The hotel I stayed at in Gourcy a couple of weeks ago surely should have been worse. Gourcy is a village with no metalled roads in Burkina Faso, the world's third-poorest country. Sometimes, there was no water. Whenever that happened, they brought a bucketful round and left it outside your room. Strange life forms inhabited the towel and there was no glass in the windows in the bedroom, but it was much nicer than this hotel. At least I felt I was somewhere, rather than nowhere. Even breakfast was better there: fresh bread and coffee. I'd definitely go back, with my family.

My mate Dom is exquisitely rich and elegant. I was with him once and he was running late for a meeting. I listened to him charter a flight to Dublin on his mobile as we travelled back to his castle. That's how swanky he is. He only doesn't have a jet of his own because he's too posh to go too far from home too often, but whenever he does travel he stays at random bed and breakfasts. He says they're always miles better than hotels and he's absolutely right. I grew up in a bed and breakfast. It was brilliant. That's where I learnt how to cook breakfast. I could do it by the time I was eight. It amazes me that big hotels are unable to deliver a decent breakfast. They like to cook it beforehand and leave it to stew for a while.

This hotel is busy. People seem to be getting married here all the time, lining up like jets coming in to land at Heathrow. Despite everything, all hotels, even this one, generate glamour. They are outside of the everyday.

People are always in hotels for a reason, everyone has a story and is slightly more open to the world in a hotel. I once did a three-day stint at the Gatwick Hilton when I was doing my flying exams. The Civil Aviation Authority has its headquarters at the airport. That, surely, should have been a disaster. The hotel is actually in the terminal. Somehow it was still glamorous.

Of course, it's people that are interesting, hotels are just the places where they meet each other. I went to the bar for a burger. I always have the burger. I've never had a bad burger in a hotel. I sat in the bar with David Soul. He played me some music on his iPod. It was a reworking of "Don't Give Up On Us Baby", one of his hits. It was always a good song.

What a voice the man has. It's got better. He's a proper crooner. He bought me a drink. That doesn't happen at home.

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