I’m writing this column from my room at the Linton Travel Tavern, where I’ve been staying since my wife left me for a fitness instructor. It’s not a bad life all told, and at least I’ve got my big plate to take maximum advantage of the all-you-can-eat buffet. And the injuries caused by that falling cow are finally beginning to heal.

In case you’re concerned for Tom Wheeler’s general well-being, I should clarify for the uninitiated that this is not my story, but the story of series 1 of ‘I’m Alan Partridge’, in which the newly single and newly unemployed chat show host gradually loses his slender grip on reality while living in a generic roadside hotel. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. If you have, watch it again, because it’s some of the most glorious tragicomedy ever seen on a tellybox. For a character who has never been far short of brilliant, it remains his crowning glory – his Best of the Beatles, if you will.

But while this isn’t my story, it’s not exactly not my story either. I am writing in a hotel room – one a bit nicer than Alan’s, but not a world away from it. I might not actually live here, but I’m around often enough to develop a sense of the same institutionalised overfamiliarity. Every aspect of the hotel is so similar to every other that, after a while, you begin to lose all sense of perspective.

Each room is the exact mirror image of the one opposite – so if my bed and bathroom were to the left of the door in my last room, it’s genuinely disconcerting for a while to check in the next time and find them on the right. This morning, a staff member I must have met 50 times asked me, in an endlessly rehearsed mantra, whether I’d had breakfast with them before. The accepted ice breakers with returning colleagues are “what floor are you on” and “do you have a working fridge”? (The latter being by far the more important, as it opens up the life-changing possibilities of cold beer and fresh milk.)

Since you asked – and deep down I know you didn’t, but I’ve been here three days and I’m hearing the voices again – I’m on floor 12, and I do have a working fridge. This, I’m beginning to work out, is something of a result – for both the aforementioned fridge and the sense that my room has, relatively recently, been subjected to the hotel’s ongoing Barely Discernible Modernisation Programme. The air conditioning is operational and quietish, the bathroom grouting Tipp-Ex white, the MDF desk almost entirely unscratched. Even the see-through door of the bath-shower thing seems to keep more water on the bath side of it than the floor side, though I suspect no amount of modernisation will ever crack that code entirely. So I still keep anything I’d like to remain unsoaked some way away from the bath, and indeed the bathroom.

Rumours abound of what the 16th floor is like – the domain of celebrities and high-ranking executives, where few of us mere mortals have ever ventured. Only one of the lifts even goes there, and I’m assured the doors won’t open without a special keycard. I’ve heard rumours of free refreshments, a roof terrace – even a few rooms that differ in some identifiable way from all the others. But I am not of that world. Also, on reflection, I might not even be thinking of the right hotel. It turns out that not only is each room in this hotel near-identical to the next, that same principle would seem to apply between hotels as well as within them.

So, while I’ve yet to go full Alan, I can quite see how it might happen. To you, to me, to anyone who stays in the same place – or worse, the not-quite-the-same place – often enough. And yet my greatest regret about this hotel life is a point of detail – a minor one, perhaps, but not so to the Partridge fans. The reversible door sign, which on one side reads “taking things easy” – in other words, do not disturb – now reads “out and about” on the other, where once it read “I’ve popped out”. Another tiny difference, but to the dedicated Partridge fan, a tragically lost reference to an epic, repeating wardrobe malfunction in short shorts. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you should. But please, be suitably wary about adopting the lifestyle.