Only vaguely connected, but: Why on earth would anyone name their daughter "Paris Hilton"?

If I were to tell you that there existed an industry in the vast majority of cultures around the globe, one which involved providing temporary homes for people for amounts of time ranging from a few hours up to months or years, and which is entirely dependent on these people being away from their families and friends for reasons which do not involve financial hardship, I suspect you'd probably either laugh at me or at least give me a very strange look. If you knew me, though, you'd probably think I was asking you a trick question, so you'd probably think about it a bit more and realise that I was talking about the hotel industry.

As with so many other aspects of life, it's easy not to notice quite how weird the concept of a hotel really is. It's become less so in relatively recent times - in an age when you can be in almost any city on Earth within 24 hours, it's entirely normal to be away from home for long periods, and since the appearance of the species Businessmanus Jawdroppinglywealthi it's understandable that establishments can charge amounts that would make Solomon weep. But why should hotels (or inns, at any rate) have likewise appeared in mediaeval times, when hardly anyone lived more than a couple of miles away from the rest of their family and acquaintances? How about the inns mentioned in the Bible? Did they really subsist on the trade caused by the odd donkey salesman passing through? The universality of this concept is one that I find really puzzling.

Being one of the huge number of former students without an income, any time I need to experience the services of these establishments I'm forced to go down to the rather cheaper end of the spectrum. In the UK, this largely doesn't exist, but luckily if you go abroad there are more options. For example, the photo below is of Hotel F1 in the town of Beaune in the middle of France.

It's certainly not a beautiful building, and that impression is strengthened once you see the rooms - the overall impression I got was of staying inside an oversized Lego brick. All of the rooms were identical, holding a double bed with a single bunk over the top, a tiny desk in one corner, a TV suspended above it, and a sink in another corner. Toilets and showers were communal, and there weren't very many.

On the positive side, the whole place was kept very clean, and it was incredibly cheap - 27 Euros per room per night, regardless of how many people were in each room. (Within reason.) For real cheapness, though, going to Africa is the way forward. I think the cheapest establishment I found in Uganda when travelling alone cost 7,000 Ugandan shillings a night. In British terms, that's £2. And yet, a certain grubbiness and lack of TV (or any other technology) aside, the facilities were very similar to the Beaune offering.

I think this means that there's some kind of sliding scale of hotels. Within the middle band, paying noticeably more results in noticeably better facilities - maybe by measuring the number and value of complimentary items you get, you could produce some kind of linear relationship. Get near the top of the scale, though, and you'll end up paying vast amounts of money without anything improving all that much. There's only so much training you can give hotel staff - no matter how much emphasis you put on the customer's wellbeing, you just can't turn them into soulless automatons. (I'll resist the temptation to make a joke about McDonald's employees.) Likewise, things like solid silver swimming pools and chlorinated cutlery don't really add to the enjoyment as much as their cost suggests.

Similarly, down at the bottom end of the scale you get limited by the law. Given that you simply cannot put your customers on a bare patch of dirt for the night and charge them for it, there exists a lowest level of service possible, and no matter how little money you pay, you will receive that level. And, given that hotels, like any other business, will set their prices according to what people can pay, all you need do is go somewhere with almost no wealth in the general population, and you'll be paying rock bottom prices for the basic comfort level.

The fact that some people feel that they can't bear a level of comfort quite this low is, I think, their problem...