I Don’t Care How Small The £19 Hotel Room Is. It’s Heaven To Me

My ultimate fantasy takes place in a hotel room. I pad down a quiet corridor, the silence only broken by the trundle and click of the wheelie case I drag behind me. I open a heavy door, throw the case to the floor, strip down to my underwear, hurl myself onto the bed … and that's it. Some versions of the fantasy involve a family-sized bag of barbecue Kettle Chips. In others I turn on the television and discover a channel that is running a back-to-back viewing marathon of Grand Designs. That's probably the best one.

There's nothing nicer than being sealed into your own secure, private space, Swiss-rolled into fresh, clean bed linen, while you watch a pair of idiots borrowing millions of pounds to live in a leaky caravan on a building site.

There are few experiences more luxurious than being able to reach a flushing toilet within seconds of leaving your bed

I love hotels. Whether they're huge or humble, every single room feels like a grown-up theme park to me. Nothing thrills me more than having to stay in a hotel for work. Perhaps pathetically, it feels like a validation of my professional existence. I've stayed at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and sipped $30 room-service hot chocolate in the bath at 4am. I've stayed in a tiny, windowless room in Blackpool - and only realised on checking out, when a man was waiting impatiently outside the door with a battalion of brooms and buckets, that I'd spent the night in a cleaning supplies cupboard. Both felt like adventures. So I hope to find the opportunity to stay in one of the new "keenly priced" Premier Inn Zip hotels. I'm not sure that it's fair to describe it as a "no frills" chain, though. It might be basic, but every hotel room can be luxurious if, like me, you're easily pleased and have an overactive imagination.

Take room service. While I will pay over the odds to eat almost anything that has been wheeled in on a trolley and covered with a large silver dome, even the smartest hotels sometimes send up woolly chips, depressed lettuce and a sandwich that appears to have been made in a Breville that recently celebrated its centenary. All anyone ever wants from a room-service dinner is something hot and calorific that can be eaten in bed, late at night, in their pants. If you've got a phone, and can ring for a takeaway, you've got a full room-service menu. The Zip will seem a lot less basic if you think of it as a late-night hotspot for eclectic local cuisine.