Food: Conference call

The Grand Hotel, Brighton, is the most beautiful hotel in England. It is bright and shiny like Simon Cowell’s teeth, surrounded by something very ugly, like Simon Cowell’s face. It even managed to look beautiful when the IRA blew a cartoon hole in it, from which Margaret Thatcher emerged covered in dust and more dangerous than ever, like ­Grendel’s mother. Maybe it is the memory of all that adultery, but the Grand is a happy place, the hotel that Londoners flee to, have bad sex and look out the ­window at the English Channel, a stretch of water so boring it looks more like paint than water. The English Channel is a disgrace and it knows it; it doesn’t even try to be a sea.

Inside, the hotel does its best but all these old seaside hotels are fraying since the rise of easyJet; they are made of nylon and ennui and could live, full-sized, in Ian McEwan’s head.