OVER CHRISTMAS my husband and I stayed at a gorgeous country house hotel in deepest Sussex and had a wonderful time, even though we managed to miss almost every single item on our itinerary thanks to being either drunk or hung over. Imagine Days Of Wine and Roses with doilies and finger bowls and you’ve just about got it.
But one thing we missed purposely rather than accidentally was the offer of complimentary “pampering” at the spa. For some reason we found the idea of getting “treatments” and “massages” hilarious and, shamefully and somewhat babyishly, could be heard howling: “You want a massage, you do!” or: “Ooo, you want someone to give you a facial!” for several hours after the offer had been made. For the life of me I couldn ’t tell you why the idea seemed so funny, but it was.
Then when we got home I bought the latest issue of Harpers & Queen, for my sins, and realised exactly why I had eschewed pampering in favour of pixilation. Reading the testimonies of the simpering sissies who had “contributed” — if that’s the word for the steaming, insipid drivel that tried to pass as journalism within the pages of its 2006 Spa Guide — I must say that reading it honestly made me realise why men do the somewhat nasty things women are always accusing them of. That is, why they flee from commitment, why they live in septic pits, why their idea of fun is smearing pizza on their sheets and drinking lager from their socks, why they wallow in onanism and brute sports and downloading barnyard porn. It’s because they have, at some point, come into contact with the sort of woman who frequents spas. And they have decided that any way of being is better than being like that, even if it makes you Stig of the Dump. Mind, once you ’d been wrapped in “fermenting hay”, as one of these places charges you royally to endure, who’d know the difference? Honestly, could spas be more openly contemptuous of their punters’ gullibility if they had HELLO, SUCKERS! in neon over the entrance?
Apparently people now spend more than £670 million a year on treatments to combat “stress”. Actually, for people read “women”. And frankly, I don’t think it’s anything to do with stress at all, because if it was, the women going in for it would be nurses and teachers rather than ladies-who-lunch, past-it-girls and jumped-up belles-de-whore. A funny thing I’ve noticed over the years is that women who like spas tend not to like swimming, something that really is good for you in every way; and I believe that they don’t like swimming simply because it’s too democratic. They like spas, on the other hand, because for a brief while they can overcome their understandably low self-esteem and feel like Lady Muck.
The one time I went to a spa — The Treatment Rooms in Brighton — strictly for journalistic purposes, I couldn’t help feeling what an indignity it was for a beautiful young girl such as Sarah to be washing the hideously deformed (if sweet-smelling) feet of an old lush like me. But when I mentioned this to a friend who regularly has treatments, she laughed. “Oh, they love doing it!” Yeah, right; almost as much as hookers love labouring over the smelly parts of all-too-imperfect strangers too, I bet.
Of course, when I wrote about my experience at The Treatment Rooms, I lied and said I’d loved it, just because I liked the girls so much. But what they did left me absolutely cold — and I don’t believe this was because they lacked skill at what they did. No, at the risk of being crude, I believe it’s because I am extremely happily married (third time lucky!) — nudge, nudge — whereas the sort of woman who likes spas is either one who gets no sex, or one who gets too much of the wrong kind; you know, the kind when they never ask you for an encore. In short, spas are for celibates and slappers, and “pampering” is sex for the sexless and rest for the restless.
Who on earth has to pay people to touch them, under the guise of a facial, a massage or a “treatment”? It’s bad enough making people pay to touch you — because then you’re a prossie! — but paying to be touched, as women who go in for this lark do, are even sadder and weirder. I bet you could prove with a pie chart that the more treatments a broad buys, the fewer orgasms she has — because what all that touchy-feely bollocks seeks to mimic, of course, is the glow you get in that crucial 15 minutes after really good sex. It’s a chicken and egg situation, though; do women who aren’t having good sex crave pampering because of it, or do women who crave pampering narrow their chances of getting good sex by being such drips?
Spas may be laughable when they allude to sex — Bliss, Completely Bare — but they are downright offensive when their names imply that white Western women are carrying a burden that weighs them down so singularly that the poor little diddumses can only bear it by forking out huge sums to have hot stones placed on their poor broken bodies — Nurturing Nest, The Sanctuary, Urban Retreat. And they are downright mind-boggling in their stupidity when they refer to the wonders of extreme nature — Ten Thousand Waves, Monsoon — after the events of Boxing Day 2004. It is ironic that the greatest number of high-end spas abroad are in the countries hit by the 2004 tsunami — Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Maldives — and something genuinely repulsive about Western hacks smacking their lips over the “unbelievable bargains” and “rock-bottom prices” in the region, directly due to the deaths of as many as 300,000 people.
Reading patronising travel journalism about “the resilience of the Thai people”, you can’t help but wonder why the boobies who frequent the spas of the tsunami-devastated region can’t copy this admirable quality — and without their seaweed wraps and caviar facials.
