In my day… oh dear, it’s hard to believe I’ve started to use that dreaded phrase, so often on my mother’s lips as she bemoaned the changes wrought by modern life. But when it comes to highly respectable hotels now advertising themselves as the perfect venue for daytime assignations, I can’t help it.

In my day, and my mother’s, there was no easy, cut-price or fail-safe way of spending a discreet afternoon in a classy hotel (we’re not talking dives). Couples choosing a venue for their assignations had to book a room for the night, regardless of whether they would be there in the morning, and a lot of nervous, loved-up pairs called Smith would then check in, or a gentleman would check in under his own name, later joined by a lady who preferred to slip upstairs unobserved.

It was all very cloak-and-dagger, costly and fraught with danger, that sort of carry-on. Serves them right, my mother would have said, and decried the advent of a website called Dayuse, a hotel-booking service that makes illicit rendezvous a whole lot easier, as yet another passport to perdition.

Created in Paris – where else? – Dayuse lists more than 7,000 hotels in 25 countries, offering up to 75 per cent discount on overnight rates for daytime stays as well as maximum discretion: cash payment, reservation confirmations reduced to the minimum (by text if preferred), no-fee cancellation up to the last minute and only the guest’s name and arrival date communicated to the hotel. Paris, home of the cinq à sept, has always had a more laissez-faire attitude to extramarital liaisons and in that city really quite respectable establishments have been known to offer hourly rates discreetly. A friend of mine once worked in a small but smart Left Bank hotel, where three afternoons a week, a well-known politician would appear at reception. “When he comes in, just hand over the key to room 20,’’ my friend was told by the manager, “and say nothing.”

Naughty. And not for me, thank goodness. I love the rhythm of my life ­– married for 43 years to the same bloke, still working and travelling but also into gardening and being a hands-on granny – and I can think of no worse hell than tarting myself up and creeping into a hotel by the back stairs in order to spend time with someone who belonged to someone else.