There may be more agreeable ways to spend a summer Friday afternoon than having your boyfriend knock off work at lunchtime and come and pick you up in his jalopy for a motorvating trip to the West Country but, especially as I get older, I can't think of any.
There is something about the word "West" - True West, Go West, Westward Ho! - that makes one feel light-hearted. As we drove along the arterial roads from Brighton, more and more cars with surfboards and/or boats on board started showing up, until there was this great rushing feeling of communal westerly pleasure-seeking. As Sussex becomes Hampshire and Dorset, Devon and Cornwall seem to call you on like sirens with silly names - Poxwell, Piddlehinton, Plush - you become part of the weekend exodus of the south-east's jaded and affluent in search of their land of lost content.
It's a long drive from Brighton to Torquay - four hours - but even at such a moment of radiant happiness, there is always the spiteful satisfaction of knowing that those surfers and boaters heading for Cornwall have got even further to go. Devon is Cornwall's polite neighbour, and what it lacks in rugged beauty it makes up for in sheer prettiness. This is especially true of the section of the south Devon coast known, somewhat hopefully, as "the English Riviera" - Brixham, Paignton and my own El Dorado, Torquay.
There is a theory about female pulchritude which says that beauty and prettiness have nothing to do with each other, but when you look at Marilyn Monroe you know it's not true. Sometimes prettiness held for an extremely long beat can become beauty, as it did in Marilyn and as it does at Torquay. She wasn't a real blonde and it's not really the Riviera, but when it looks that good, who cares?
I've been to the Bahamas and the Maldives in the line of duty, but I'd rather go to Torquay any day; the best way I can assure you of my sincerity is to point out that since I became a travel writer, Torquay is the only place I've actually paid to go to, not once but four times. Those of you familiar with my roaming oeuvre will recall the existence of an internal machine, which I call my Torquameter; that is, if a place resembles Torquay (L'Ile Rousse, Madeira) I always love it, but if it doesn't (the Grand Canyon) I don't. Yet ever since Fawlty Towers, this matchless town has been a byword for rinky-dink naffness. On the contrary, he who is tired of Torquay is truly tired of life and should scurry back to London as soon as possible, as keeping his nose to the grindstone and making his pile is truly all he is fit for.
Torquay is so cool, yet so hot; I know that, logically, it can't always be warm there, but I've never been when the weather has been less than glorious. In many English towns such a plethora of palm trees would look ridiculous; here they look perfectly appropriate, and the English Riviera shtick seems pretty apt, if a little campy. Even during this wet and dreary summer, the July weekend we were there - when Brighton cringed under a gunmetal sky - it was the hottest place in the British Isles, at 22C.
Nevertheless, I don't think I'd like Torquay quite as much if not for the existence of the Imperial Hotel, a five-star heaven which stands on a cliff overlooking Torbay - as grand and other-worldly as the Overlook in The Shining (albeit without unpleasing and murderous aspects), yet only five minutes' walk from the bright and breezy town centre.
In my book, the test of a truly great hotel is if you would still want to stay there if it was in a nasty place rather than a nice one. Like Pink Sands in the Bahamas and Reid's Palace in Madeira, the Imperial would still be worth visiting if it was set on the middle of a blasted moor in Yorkshire - the food, service and atmosphere are that good. I am a hotel junkie, and would much rather stay in a good hotel in a nasty place than a bad hotel in a nice one, but at the Imperial the two worlds collide and you find yourself in the lap of luxury overlooking the most beautiful bay in England from acres of tropical gardens with excel lent beaches on either side. One of them, Livermead Beach, has had the Blue Flag for the past 20 years and is reached along a winding National Trust pathway; the other, Torre Abbey Sands, is not so much to look at in the natural beauty stakes, but is cheap and cheerful with the added advantage of being adjacent to the cafés and restaurants of the town.
But to me the real beauty of Torquay is the boat culture. In Brighton, shamefully, it is easier to buy a gramme of smack than to get taken out commercially on a boat; the yachts are all docked at the town's remote and ugly marina and commercial boat hire is non-viable simply because people don't want to have to travel miles from the beach whenever they get a yen for a bit of life on the ocean waves. Walk down the hill from the Imperial, though, and within a few minutes every sort of boat is proffered for your pleasure: fishing trips, night cruises, all-day cruises along the River Dart stopping off at the sleepy towns of deep Devon and, best of all, the scores of white-knuckle speedboats driven by bronzed buccaneers - honestly, you haven't lived until you've ridden on the Rigid Raider.
Like sex in Phuket or trinkets in Cairo, boats are thrust in your face every time you step out on to the street in Torquay and, considering that we are an island race, it seems strange and sad that this should be the exception in seaside towns rather than the norm. To cap it all, after spending a fortune in various exotic locales on boat trips that promised dolphins a-plenty to spy on, the one time it actually happened was in Torquay, on an ordinary five-quid speed-boat ride last year. We were expecting to get a pleasant but basically tame view of the bay, heard splashing behind us and turned round to see a leaping shoal of the grinning fiends.
Boating completed, get off your face at the brilliant Café Mambo on the lethal BBC TV cocktails (brandy, Bacardi, Cointreau, Tia Maria and vodka) and be thoroughly unsettled by the palm- reading powers of Gypsy Eva Petulengro, who told me EVERYTHING about myself (I'm talking real four-in-the-morning confessions that only a mother or an agent would be privy to), finishing off with something I'd always suspected, horribly, about myself: that I had known great professional success, but that my real talent was for making Mah Maaan happy. Well, there's no point in fighting it, then.
By now, you'll be totally boated-out, drunk and spooked, so stagger up the short hill to the Imperial and slob out by the perfect outdoor swimming-pool set into the cliffs. (It is a mark of the excellent climate here that in five years I have never once used the Imperial's indoor pool, splendid-looking though it is).
By the pool you will get a taste of just how brilliant the service is here; the staff will ask casually if you want anything as they stroll by, but there is a complete absence of the obsequiousness that, appallingly, is now the norm in many parts of the world where Americans go on holiday and where the indigenous people have been groomed accordingly. Neither is there the sloppiness or surliness which I've personally never encountered in British hotels and restaurants, but about which you hear so much from curmudgeonly old columnists. There is the feeling, in staff-guest interaction at the Imperial, of people working on the same side to make everything as beatific as possible; after just a few hours of this, one finds oneself slipping into that violently tranquil state that only certain types of narcotics and hotels bring about.
The staff are both warm and elegant, which is quite a tricky one to pull off; by now you'll be saying that, of course, they'd be nice knowing I was going away to write about it - but I've been there four times already under my married name, and even when I was only the fat bird with the young boyfriend staying in a room rather than the hack in the de luxe suite, I received exactly the same treatment.
Your sunstroke will ease off the minute you step back into the cool depths of the cavernous marble interior, which has seen a few changes since its opening in 1866, but still retains the basic grandeur that attracted the likes of Napoleon III, George VII and Howard Marks at the height of his powers. Get out of those wet things and into a dry martini in the Piano Bar or the Cocktail Bar; sober up with a Devon cream tea in the Colonnade or Palm Court lounges. And rest assured that no matter who you are or how you're dressed, no one is ever going to look at you as if you have sick on your chin, as the staff of grand hotels are often wont to.
Such is the accommodating nature of the Imperial that it even welcomes our canine chums in selected rooms, amazingly open-minded at a time when dogs are generally blamed for everything from cancer to the poor weather.
I f you're feeling energetic, you can venture out to the brilliant Babbacombe Model Village (20 minutes away on the free bus going on the hour from outside Boots) as featured in Brookside, visit the Hedgehog Hospital at Prickly Ball Farm (I swear I'm not making this up), go walking or riding on nearby Dartmoor or pose around the Winter Gardens. But my bet is that the whole Imperial experience will have gotten to you by now, and you'll be happy just to lounge on balconies the size of a small hotel room, watching the boats cut white lines in the perfect bay.
If you've got brats, drop them off at the in-house nursery/playroom or send them downtown into the amusement arcades, the biggest and best of which has sofas, free cold drinks and casually eagle-eyed young nanny/hostesses to keep the perves away.
Later on, whether you dine at the formal Regatta Restaurant (seriously serious, grown-up, Ivy League food such as chateaubriand and lobster thermidor, with an eye-watering wine list) or on the Sundeck Brasserie (funky, provocative nosh such as tandoori monkfish with pimiento, and spinach gnocchi with cheddar and Parmesan glaze) it will be the bay once more that you gaze out over, and you'll come over all Freudian as you reflect that the beauty of bays is all to do with being enclosed in the sea but not threatened by it; that the scariest and most regal sight known to man, the ocean, seems to be your friend. As everyone does here.
This summer has been a dull and dreary beast and it is understandable that many people who planned to take their holidays at home have, apparently, panicked at the last moment and snapped up Med bargains by the bucket. But if you are fortunate enough to be able to hold your nerve and pick your moment, I cannot imagine a better place on earth for fun-seekers of all ages to head for than the town of Torquay and its swish citadel, the Imperial. It was clever Mr Baudelaire who said that the ideal life was one of "calme, luxe, volupte" and here, right in your own backyard, you will find it.
The practicals
Standard double rooms at the Imperial Hotel start at £170 per night. Rooms with a sea-view start at £200 a night. Two- to four-night leisure breaks in August from £105 per person per night, including breakfast and dinner. For more information, contact at the Imperial Hotel, Park Hill Road, Torquay, Devon TQ1 2DG (tel: 01803 294301). For trains to Devon, call National Rail Enquiries on 0845 7484950. For coaches, call the National Express Enquiry Line on 0870 5808080.
