I suppose there are people who stay in four or five-star hotels all their lives and become a kind of expert in them, turning their noses up at rooms I would regard as the acme of comfort, but since my parents stopped paying, I never have. In adulthood my standards have plummeted and, as a traveller, I’ve stayed in any number of grotty places. I’m not complaining either – you have much more fun in life when there’s nothing to protect you from what Maxim Gorky, in a lyrical moment, called the ‘lower depths.’
None of this was erotic in any way but had a kind of anthropological edge to it
My real travels started when I moved to Estonia at 26. Eastern Europe was definably post-communist then, and the places you stayed at, in countries like Latvia and Lithuania, had a spartan Soviet charm with the odd kitsch flourish. For a few quid you got the standard room with a painted wooden floor, a black and white television and some flimsy, salmon pink curtains. Here, if you had a kettle, a cup and some sachets of three-in-one coffee, you were in business. You also had to bring your own drinking water, and woe betide you if you forgot. What came out of the taps was often the colour of mud and, if you were drunk or fool enough to drink it on a clear day, tasted like it had a snot stock cube crumbled into it. Vodka, whatever the brand, was usually a safer bet.
In 1990s Russia, where I worked as a travelling literature lecturer, another issue was cockroaches. In the student halls of residences they stuck me in, the underside of nearly every warm pipe was coated with a jostling, biblical crowd of them. Cockroaches (baby ones at any rate) got into your........