Why?

Because quality time in a Malmaison bar is never a bad thing, in my experience. I've never really understood this antipathy towards chains. 'Oh no, we're all going to get homogenised and immersed in one-note blandness and overrun by lookie-likie city centres and blah blah blah ...' Whatever. When a bar, or restaurant, or shop, or club, or hotel is good, then frankly it should breed all it likes, spread its well-considered, well-styled tentacles far and wide, and generally make the world a more fragrant place. The Malmaison hotel group is a very good case in point - a collection of v nicely done medium-sized hotels which offer up good social/sleeping, boozing/eating opportunities to the populace - even in the provinces! The whole country should be a bit more Malmaison, in the Cocktail Girl's not-especially humble opinion.

OK. So why Oxford?

The Cocktail Girl found herself down that way, so naturally gravitated towards the hotel. Now, the Malmaison Oxford is particularly curious, because it's located inside what was a fully operational prison. It's got walkways and austere stone walls, a big old glassed-over atrium and three storeys of windows to lighten up what was once, presumably, a very grim central corridor; the rooms are former cells and the bar itself is set in what was the visitors' room - it's a big old space with a high ceiling which is overlooked by a pulpit where a warden would once have stood and watched over the lags for bad behaviour. The whole thing works brilliantly well, it's got edge and style and a nicely gruesome undercurrent. I instantly (and brilliantly) christened it Lag Luxe. Or Clink Chic.

Not your first time inside, I'd imagine?

Actually, I haven't been incarcerated at all up until this point, not even juvenile detention, not even rehab - although I reckon I could totally rock a whole Bad Girls scenario, get by on my wits and my contacts outside, brew something intoxicating in the canteen kitchen, and mix a mean Martini for my special friends before lights out and lock down, that sort of thing.

I don't think prison is like it seems on telly ...

Really? How peculiar. Regardless, prison Malmaison-style is certainly very fun. Oddly beautiful, rather cool, witty but not remotely theme-ish in execution. The staff are fully briefed in the history of the joint, and will regale you with stories of plague deaths and executions and other scariness. Jann from Poland is the head barman in the visitors' room; he mixes me a fine vodkatini and stops for a chat.

Poor misguided boy.

It was something of a slow, gloomy Thursday night in January when I tipped up, and accordingly the bar was not packed to the rafters with seven shades of giddy reveller. There was a sprinkling of residents and one excellent example of your archetypal bushy-haired, Rolexed-up Eurotrash businessman reading a paper. So I asked Jann: what kind of a crowd drinks regularly in Malmaison? Is it mostly residents? 'Yes, and some posh people,' he says. Students? I ask. 'No,' he says. 'We try some things to attract them, but they do not come.' I think that's a good selling pitch personally, but I don't labour the point.

Plus one never knows whether or not you'd go all Hugh Grant, if faced with large quantities of intoxicated undergraduates.

It is something of a possibility. But I didn't do anything like that - not on this occasion, at least.

What did you do?

Take my vodkatini up to my fabulous, huge, oval room, with its roll-top bath and curved walls, which probably once housed about 17 inmates, but now houses just little old moi; and I change into a branded bathrobe, and sip my drink in my bed, just like that Mr Big type out of Porridge.

· Malmaison Oxford, New Road, Oxford ,01865 268400, www.malmaison-oxford.com