There are many good things about France, but one of the very best is the ready availability of enormous jars of Dijon mustard for 19p. Almost all a tourist's basic needs, from Pernod to petrol, are cheaper over the Channel. And though French hotels have their flaws - bolster pillows, risibly inadequate breakfasts, an idiotic propensity to shut up shop during the holiday season - exorbitance isn't one of them.
The Michelin Guide is a reliable and discerning authority, yet within its pages you will find appealing and comfortable hotels offering rooms for an outlay that wouldn't bag you bed and breakfast in Bridlington. Stay away from the big cities and the south and you can almost guarantee that the ritziest hotel in town is unlikely to cost more than 60 quid a night. A rock-bottom price for a room at the top - so why do I so rarely find my feet on the upper rungs of the accommodation ladder? The above examples are exceptions that prove a regrettable rule: however cheap nice hotels are in France, a life-blighting preoccupation with economy always drives me that extra kilometre to find one that is more cheap, even though it will consequently be less nice.
You think: 'That's jars of Dijon mustard down the pan. It's partly that I am still engaged in a Proustian struggle to recapture the magic of the first accommodation bill I ever paid for out of my own pocket, back in And it's partly that, setting off on a trip from London to Venice in the footsteps of the first Grand Tourist, I felt a slight yet shaming spiritual affinity with the eighteenth-century author of the following peerlessly titled travelogue: A Gentleman's Guide in his Tour through France by an Officer who lately travelled on a principle which he most sincerely recommends to his countrymen, viz.
Because if the flashest French hotels are a bargain, how impossibly economical must the most basic be? Drive around any ring road and the answer will blare out at you from a yellow chequerboard hoarding marooned above the light-industrial wilderness: stay in a Formule 1 hotel and three people can share a room for less than a fiver a head.
Ever since reading a newspaper story about the success of the Formule 1 phenomenon I had wanted to try one out.
