Blakes Hotel in South Kensington was a particular favourite of mine during what I affectionately think of as my Restless Years. I laughed, loved and pushed the basement restaurant's signature Fabergé Egg - lobster encased in an egg made of chicken and tied with a black truffle bow, if you please! And me a Communist! - listlessly around their signature black octagonal plates, because I'd taken too much bad coke, on more evenings than I care to remember.
As an impressionable provincial redneck teenybopper, Blakes struck me as being the most beautiful place I'd ever seen, partly because I really like black (and everything is black at Blakes) and partly because it seemed so... so wrong. It boasted neither comfort nor value, which we are taught to prize above all in hotels, and seemed to positively revel in the absence of these square time-servers. Instead, the enjoyment was all in the extortionate details - the aforementioned decadent egg, the mini-bar containing Berocca, Billecart and oxygen (wa-hey!), the oranges inexplicably and probably unfairly locked in little cages in reception. The slightly sinister monochrome Chinoiserie of the rooms, with their magnificently theatrical lighting (spotlights everywhere!) and that singularly uncomfortable posh rough-matting which always took you by surprise the first morning your bare feet touched it, sending you hopping back towards the bed (four posts, but strangely no canopies or drapes - begging for handcuffs, really), there to send flying a multitude of useless, pyramid-piled cushions, some surely only sized to support a dolly-head. Minimalist, or "a machine for living", Blakes certainly isn't. But it is sexy, in spades.
So I was curious as to how this masterpiece of artifice would fit into easy-going Amsterdam. It made me laugh when I saw the row of bicycles lined up in the gothic courtyard on the banks of the gorgeous Keizersgracht canal - they were all black, obviously. That may look smart, but black bikes aren't very practical, especially in a city where it gets dark at four o'clock in winter. Although expecting practicality from Blakes is about as clever as expecting Pratesi sheets at a Premier Lodge - form, not function, is its forte.
Still, once we were ensconced in our room, I couldn't help thinking that you can take aesthetics a bridge too far; the Japanese-themed "Kimono Room" would have looked fab hanging on a wall, but living in it, even briefly, turned out to be a different matter.
After a few nights, I think I began to understand the behaviour of the Japanese kamikaze pilots during the second world war, previously a mystery to me; they didn't particularly want to die for the Emperor, they just couldn't stand to go back to homes where a few flimsy screens were all that stood between their noisiest bodily functions and their assembled blood relatives.
No one wants to visit the bathroom in full earshot of their nearest and dearest, and aren't the Japanese supposed to be the most modest of people? All the tea ceremonies and flower-arranging in the world couldn't chill them out after such daily humiliations, for sure.
The toilet was behind one sliding glass screen, the bath behind another. And it was JUST a bath - no floor, no nothing, just a bath behind a glass screen - WITH NO HANDLES! Of course I got trapped, and had to be rescued - the indignity! If two old ladies locked in a lavatory is inelegant, one middle-aged broad trapped in a bath is even more comic. The washbasin was like a trough, with no plug, and water coming out of a sort of guttering rather than taps. On our first morning, we were rudely awoken by an unasked-for alarm call at 7.45am. Later, it was impossible to get an outside line for hours. Down in the restaurant, the plot thickened, and my temper shortened.
Blakes is extremely expensive in both London and Amsterdam (cup of tea €4.50, chicken sandwich €12); however, the London Blakes made up for this by having the most wonderful service you've ever come across. By great service, I don't mean bowing and scraping; I mean treating every guest as though they were equally important.
A shy and scruffy friend of mine was once checking into the cheapest room they had, for one night, with her similarly inclined boyfriend, when an incredibly famous film star - male, American - shoved her out of the way and also attempted to check in, into the most expensive suite, for three weeks. My friend reported with glee how the beautiful receptionist had given him a look that could turn men to stone (and judging by his recent film performances, did) and hissed, "I'll be with you in a moment, SIR, as soon as I have assisted this LADY."
The service at this Blakes, though, had lost something in the translation. The staff were a slow-mo no-show; at breakfast, a simple basket of rolls and pot of coffee took more than half an hour to arrive. Dinner seemed to have been dreamed up by a very camp, rather mad scientist, served as it was in test tubes and black boxes: it claimed to be influenced by ancient Dutch sea-faring fare, but I found it very difficult to imagine the rough tars of the 18th century feasting on the caviar, foie gras and truffles which featured so heavily on the menu. And goodness knows what possessed me to order the Bloody Mary Soufflé, but I wasn't expecting a shivering, shuddering six-inch-tall mountain of whipped egg whites with tomato juice poured over it.
We had cabin fever, albeit a sumptuous cabin, and we needed to get out more - never a chore in Amsterdam, one of my favourite places. Whenever I get off the plane at Schiphol after an hour in the air - about the same time as a journey from London to Brighton by express-train - I always wonder why any Brit bothers to go anywhere else BUT Amsterdam, except to the Canaries for the sun of course.
And call me a pig, but isn't it brilliantly refreshing how early the Dutch eat dinner? When they're still laying out the cutlery in achingly hip Barcelona, they're hanging the CLOSED sign on the restaurant doors of old Amsterdam. This habit seems to me typical of Dutch unpretentiousness - or it could be that people get too stoned to eat late. The upfrontness of the "coffee shops", where all kinds of (here I put on my Ann Widdecombe voice) "marri-who-ana" is sold freely ("Carly Mist" seemed a particular favourite) strike the drug-hungry Brit as totally outrageous at first, with their shopfront banners screaming GET YOUR SMOKE HERE! But after a day or so, it totally seems of a piece with the clear-eyed frankness, wholesomeness even, of the Amsterdam which goes about its business beyond the joyless grind of the Red Light District.
In some ways, it is an eternal student city, with its museums and bicycles, except here the museums seem like fun, not work, and you don't feel the overwhelming desire to urge your taxi towards the 400,000 cyclists the way you do in Oxford and Cambridge.
Amsterdam has more than 150 canals and 1,250 bridges, but it never seems crowded, nor bent and bitter from fleecing the tourist. It seems the perfect size - 750,000 people - and shockingly easy to get around thanks to those trams! The openness of the people can be seen in many of their attitudes; in the way that lots of workers sit up there in the huge picture windows of the great canal houses, now mostly offices, peering at their computers in full view of the passer-by, as if in solidarity with their sex-slave sisters uptown.
Flicking through charming prints in a quaint old shop near the museum quarter, no one but us seemed to find it funny that alongside the expected "Tulips" and "Canal Boats" categories, there was one called simply "Toilets". When we went to the KattenKabinet - a private house museum devoted to cat-themed art patrolled by actual cats - we ooo-ed and ahhh-ed over the usual cuddly/noble images of the feline form, but gaped in astonishment at the etchings of cats having full penetrative sex with humans. Nowhere outside of Amsterdam can one imagine the cutesy and the kinky sitting side by side in such a matter-of-fact way.
The museums and art galleries feel different, too - easy like Sunday morning, and full of everyday miracles, from the Van Gogh Museum (why do all of The Potato Eaters look like Martin Clunes? And Self-Portrait With A Surprised Expression is a good title - Vince had obviously just had dinner at Blakes) to the modern art heaven/haven of the Stedelijk (have a look for Milan Kunc's painting of the shocked-looking stag with a mess of consumer durables hanging off his antlers - trippy!). There were many places to be fed and watered between epiphanies, from the cool, contemporary Cobra Cafe in the Museum District to Leonardo's pizza restaurant in the Reguliersbreestrat.
As with Prague, there has been a tendency of late among Guardian-reader types (and I use that as a compliment, not a slam) to bemoan the fact that these supremely beautiful cities have been "surrendered" to and ruined by the Great British Unwashed, usually in the shape of stag parties. Not only does this show an unpleasant, superior attitude to the spectacle of People Not Like Us taking their ease, it also shows a lack of confidence in both oneself and one's own type and the places themselves. Cities which survived and then thrived after Nazi occupation can surely pull through a few sweary drinking sessions; in fact, to surrender these fantastic places to people one finds unpleasant is rather like surrendering the Union Flag to the BNP. So just stop moaning, get out there and enjoy them!
Way to go
Getting there: Travelscene (020-8424 9648) has four nights' B&B at the five-star Blakes Hotel from £831pp, including British Airways flights from Gatwick or Heathrow. Two-night breaks from £491pp.
Where to stay: Blakes Hotel, Keizersgracht 384, Amsterdam 1016 (+20 530 20 10). Doubles from €370.
Further information: visitholland.com, visitamsterdam.nl. Country code: 0031. Flight time London-Amsterdam: 1hr. Time difference: +1hr. £1 = 1.36 euros.
