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. It is a prole palace now, full of mad carpets and people screaming for your credit card details. What is it with English hotels and mad carpets? Are we using them to emote? What was wrong with football?
Anyway, the Grand has a restaurant and here we are, on a damp Saturday night, when even the cutlery is raining. It is called the King’s Restaurant but I can see no kings, merely a collection of arthritic partygoers, silently eating in that weird way that English people are always silent in public, in case they make a mistake and say something interesting; the dark side to all this silence, of course, is drinking, screaming and smashing up Casualty, which they are also capable of.
I have never been to the Grand outside party conference season and it is strange not to be groped by a gnomish political columnist in the lift, because he thought you were somebody else, or that you mattered, or that you cared.
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