PREMIER INN, BIRMINGHAM CENTRAL HAGLEY ROAD - IN PRAISE OF MEDIOCRITY

The English as a nation are to the service industry what Stalin was to democracy, so I guess the bar is set pretty low.

We’ve all tasted the horror of an English b&b; the vertiginous swirl of carpet, the jungly fetid lack of ventilation, the dispiriting woodchip, the oppressive gothic twitchy slient munching of seething couples in the breakfast room, and of course the cardboard walls that put you in the front row of the nightly symphony of drunken squabbles, fumbled fornication, wailing children and the tooth and claw scratching of a laboratory’s-worth of mice and cockroaches.

Then came Premier Inn, with its relenlessly soothing purple branding and quiet night guarantee and clean towels. Is this a dream? We wondered. Is this Heaven?

And So. Hagley Road.

Birmingham is very much a glass half full kinda place. That is, if you live in outlyling towns and villages and pop into the centre for shopping and cinema, your glass is no doubt half full, but if you live on the Hagley Road, in a decaying, flyblown, scarred terrace, your glass may well be near enough empty

By chance and coincidence I was shooting in this road a year ago. Although as shootings are on the rise, perhaps I should say I was photographing here. Back then I was propositioned by a toothless prostitute at ten in the morning.

So, you know, it isnt all bad.

As with all Premier Inn, there is that smell; fried food, cheap generic soap and air freshener, bleach, sweat and the faint echo of a million lonely wanks.

I ask for an iron. It comes with an ironing board with no padding, so you might as well be ironing your shirt on the pavement for all the good it is.

I am not posting this review from my laptop, because despite paying an extra fiver for improved wi-fi, I have no wi-fi whatsoever. This is part of Premier Inn and Virgin’s new attention to profit margin, backing you into a corner to pay a fiver for something you then dont get. Like air con. Or hope.

The light fittings are battered, worn out and shabby, as if they have been in one too many fights and are now barely hanging in there. The bathroom is as starkly bleak as the shower scen from Psycho.

Breakfast. No middle aged person should approach this institutionalised shrine to constipation and colesterol. And yet we do.

They say the human body is 90% water, but I can testify that a premier inn sausage is in fact 100% water. Pale soggy and flavourless as an old washing up sponge, It is gone in sixty seconds, along with your ability to do a poo for the next day or so. But what about fruit, you ask. They had apples. The ones called “Golden delicious” which are neither golden nor delicious. Perhaps we are meant to make a pie with them? Long after Brexit, long after every supermarket shelf has emptied, after all glimmer of democratic hope has gone and the sea level has risen and displaced millions and we are living in scorching apocalyptic anarchy, there will still be those indestructible apples, taunting us with their hard flavourlessness. It is this, you will sigh, or a raw potato.

Outside, TGI Friday throbs with drunks. The traffic revs and grumbles as a thousand stereos compete like an Ibiza DJ contest. .

Yet, once in your room, it is quiet and clean,, the staff are adorable, the TV works, the kettle works. If this were prison, a lot more people would be breaking the law.

And all over the country it is the same. It is generic and characterless and the very opposite of classy. But it is clean, quiet and safe.

Is this heaven?

No, it’s a Premier Inn.