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Having ranted at great length about First Great Western in my

previous column, I promise not to bore you with more railway woes - oh,

all right then, just one. With almost no warning the station car park at

Exeter has been turned over to a company called Apcoa for more efficient

running.

Its first super-efficient act has been to increase the cost of weekly

parking by 43%. I didn’t notice too much customer approval of this, but

then why should customers come in the way of an efficiency drive?

This time I need to talk to you about the altogether weightier matter of

towels.

I am indebted to the chief executive of a leading London advertising

agency for drawing my attention to the hotel towel conundrum. Suddenly

they have become a watchword for environmental soundness. You can’t walk

into a hotel bathroom without finding a prim little notice telling you

that if you soil too many towels the world will vanish under a pall of

suds from the environmentally-unfriendly extra washing necessitated by

your thoughtless and indiscriminate towelling.

Now I was taught by various eminent creative directors that stimulus

does not equal response or - to put it another way - you have to be a

wee bit subtle if you want to persuade people to change their behaviour.

When you read that little notice, be honest, how do you respond? Do you

carefully dab away the drips after your shower with the smallest face

cloth, leaving the neat ranks of bath towels untouched to help save the

planet? And do you make it last for days to help the hotel conserve

valuable resources?

Or do you, like the leading adman, raise two fingers to frugality and

use every last towel on the rail - just to pay the hotel back for being

so pompous and PC?

Apart from anything else, you would think they’d realise that the single

greatest joy of a decent hotel room is the luxury of having a separate

towel for each and every ablution? Why, after all, do they put so many

damned towels there in the first place, along with those smug little

baskets of potions and shampoos, if you’re not meant to use them?

What can the explanation be? Green credentials. We must have green

credentials, they say. A hotel is about as profligate an operation as

there is conservation-wise (bed linen used for one night, food thrown

away, massive waste of water, electricity and so on), so this is their

little guilt trip: we’re pretty appalling environmentally, so please be

extra-responsible with your towels.

The stupidity is that towel conservation is a distraction. The

environment is under threat, but not from towel abuse. Last week, our

Prime Minister held a farming crisis meeting and has altogether poured

pounds 200m into the industry. And yet British farmland has become in a

single generation an ecological desert. There is now, for example, only

one skylark for every five 30 years ago. That’s not natural evolution,

by the way, it’s annihilation, and a far more accurate environmental

indicator than towel laundering. Perhaps the hotels would do the

environment more good if their little notices told us to towel away to

our heart’s content, but to take better care of our skylarks.