I'm typing this on a laptop computer propped up on two telephone directories, a room service menu and a guide to Kuala Lumpur, all piled high on a spindly coffee table.
The reason for this is that the desk in my hotel room is too high for a computer and the coffee table too low. Hotels in Asia are among the best in the world but they still have not come to terms with the age of high tech.
This hotel was built just two years ago so it has no excuse and I just wish the management had consulted me about design first. I could have told them that regular guests, not just the likes of me but business executives, sales persons, politicians, sports fans, celebrities, teenage brats, opera singers, whoever, all most likely want to get connected when they get to their hotel to check on emails or access a web site or even a computer game.
When I enter a hotel room the first thing I look for is no, not the mini-bar, but the telephone jack and wall plug. Sometimes I have to pull out the (always heavy) bed to get at the wall jack, or crawl on hands and knees under the table. I once had to write a lengthy article in the bathroom to accommodate the room geography.
Next I check the furniture, which is often a backbreaking combination of a soft, low chair suitable for the gentle sipping of tea, and a high writing table designed for straight-backed Victorians with quill pens.
And then the junk has to be cleared. Here's what my table held when I checked in to my present hotel: breakfast menu, in-room dining menu, snack menu, notice saying "non-smoking room", notice saying "do not disturb", notice saying "please make up room", blotting paper, hotel directory, telephone directory, memo pad, pen, TV guide, glossy shopping magazine, fashion magazine, city map and questionnaire on hotel facilities (which I am about to fill in). The more expensive the hotel, the more litter there is like this.
Mind you, hotels in modern Asian cities are generally of a much higher standard than in Europe, and some have adjusted to the needs of the new millennium traveller, and these I keep going back to. Would that I had a similar choice in airports!
Asia also has some wonderful airports. Singapore is regularly voted the best in the world. It is fast, efficient, clean and honest, and fulfils the whims of the regular Asia traveller (me again) who wants no more than a decent cafe and good bookshop to while away an hour or two, and somewhere to use a laptop. Actually I try to ensure that I get to spend a couple of hours there between flights to do some relaxed shopping. Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong are also top-class airports.
But Asia still has a number of pretty grim old terminals dating back to the 1950s. The ones in China are being modernised fast. Beijing Capital Airport has just this month opened a new 336,000 square metres passenger terminal, the country's largest, at a cost of £1 billion.
But here too I wish I had been consulted first. After all, I live in Beijing and regularly fly in and out and I could have told the Beijing airport authority a thing or two about design. The new terminal, alas, is a depressing place, with vast corridors of polished granite flooring and fat gun-metal pillars, and a couple of overpriced restaurants selling inferior coffee. It has no modern cafes or bookshops, or indeed shops of any kind apart from a duty-free store selling the usual booze, fags and souvenirs.
Anyone who has been through the old Beijing terminal building might say that it couldn't be worse. That little structure dated back to before the Cultural Revolution and was often crowded. The men's toilet was so smelly the attendant burned joss sticks, and it held only three people at a time, and they had to do the business in front of an open window.
But I had mastered the old terminal. With only carry-on luggage I could get through immigration and customs in a flash. I once made it from a Lufthansa plane to The Irish Times car in fewer than five minutes. Try beating that sort of time at the new terminal or at any of the mammoth new airport buildings (walking shoes recommended) whose architects have lost sight of the human dimension.
Perhaps with the ever-increasing volume of air travel they have to think of the future, but there is no excuse for the modern hotelier whose telephones in this day and age are not adapted to connect with a laptop, and who locates the phone jack in the skirting board under the bed.