WHEN I learn that a hotel I’m about to visit has a spa my heart does an expectant flip. I imagine a marble pool, vast hot tubs, a searingly hot sauna and a steam room dense enough to uncrease my weary soul. Then I recall with a sigh that “spa” in modern British leisure industry-speak has no connection with the elemental pleasures of heat, water and silence. Spa has merely come to mean a place where you go to have “treatments”.
There are women who enjoy shivering naked under a robe, worrying whether they should have kept their pants on, waiting for a uniformed Australian called Steph to crank up the plinky New Age Muzak, light the citrus aromatherapy candle and rub unguents into their nether parts.
These women share a combination of dreamy hopefulness and mild hypochondria. They believe the faux science on face cream jars about “crapulated lipids” and “cellular intrafaction” and that stumping up £130 to procure the very “therapist” who titivated Nicole Kidman before The Interpreter premiere will make their thighs shrink before their very eyes. They fuss about their health, have a self-diagnosed allergy to at least one major food group.
A treatment presupposes a malady. And just what ails British women to make them spend millions annually on treatments and exercise regimes? In her book, Spin Sisters, about the American magazine world, Myrna Blyth, herself a former editor of a glossy, lambasts the women’s press for fabricating the concept of stress. Organising Christmas, being a working mother, being a stay-at-home mother: the stuff women have done forever, and without modern conveniences, are now deemed “stressful”. Stress damages skin, hair, energy and spirit. And — the horror! — it makes you look old. So how do we fight stress? Well, we carve out “me-time” in which, ideally, we pay experts to make it go away. Only under the expensive fingers of therapists are we truly relaxed, happy and fully-realised. This indulgence is our female right: because, as we are told, we’re worth it. Which makes the unpampered woman worthless, a careless slattern who must get with the programme.
What irony that liberated women pay to be treated like harem virgins being rubbed and oiled for their first night with the sultan. Because in the language of pampering, a massage isn’t someone slathering you with body lotion. It is a “ritual” practised long ago and far away in a place where women lacked human rights, but sure knew how to deal with cellulite.
Like “the Rasul”, which is available at the London day-spa the Sanctuary “set in the traditional Turkish Rasul Chamber, three types of muds are provided for your body and face . . . The ritual ends with a cleansing tropical rain-shower.” (Since when was Turkey in the tropics?) Or the Javanese Lulur, “a traditional exfoliation ritual . . . derived from the royal palaces of central Java . . . applied daily for 40 days prior to marriage celebrations”. Or the Exotic Frangipani Body Nourish Wrap in which “aromatic Tahitian coconut and frangipani flowers are soaked together to produce the monoi which Polynesian women traditionally used to protect their skin”.
Or the Bali Boreh Ritual which — I kid you not — uses spices “applied on the legs after a day’s work of standing in the water tending the rice”. I suppose a spa can safely assume that no paddy field worker or Javanese bride will ever contradict them. And one wonders if Balinese ladies are urged to try “an age-old foot-soaking ritual practised by Lancastrian millworkers after removing their clogs”.
But I wouldn’t care that treatments are a hilarious phoney-baloney cultural travesty or that they cost around two quid a minute or even that they are as likely to improve your appearance as applying suncream naked in Debenhams’ window. I’d forgive it all if they were in any way pleasurable. I am excluding here proper massage. The tough stuff, the deep muscle probing where you need gas and air to endure the pain and walk out with your computer-hunched shoulders six inches lower. I mean the dithering, feathery faffing and fiddling which is as embarrassing and unsatisfying as an hour of paid-for foreplay without even the Thai brothel’s “happy finish”.
At the Sanctuary I once had an “African Creamy Wrap” which involves being covered in cream (from a plastic pot, not ground with a wooden pestle or extracted from a goat as one might expect), wrapped in clingfilm, covered in a heavy tarpaulin, then left alone for 20 minutes. Without a book, too weirded-out to sleep, I could only deduce that it was devised by one of the nastier African despots. All that boredom and £34 just so my skin could feel momentarily softer.
The things that really make you look younger and feel great — vegetables, violent exercise, friends, sleep and regular sex — are mundane, unglamorous and unexclusively available anywhere. But they’re better than a lifetime on narrow beds in spurious spas, having treatments for a condition you can never cure because it doesn’t really exist.
Relax - do as the Romans did, but don't try and do it in a day
IT USED to be that there was a clear distinction between the place where you got your legs waxed (the salon) and the place where you went to get back into shape (the spa). The former was all about function; the latter much more about being chic.
At the very least a restored stately home, or in its ideal form a Swiss chateau staffed by inscrutable blondes, the spa was a place of mystery and intrigue. Think of Alain Resnais’s 1961 French classic Last Year In Marienbad, in which a luxury hotel retreat forms the backdrop for an exquisitely noir love story; or a portly Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again, eluding the unwanted advances of the snake-wielding temptress Fatima Blush.
A spa was somewhere you arrived world-weary and pudgy and departed a lighter, smoother version of your former self. The cures were often outlandish, at times downright foolhardy — even borderline illegal. In Jaqueline Susann’s cult novel The Valley of the Dolls “sleep cure” — essentially prolonged general anaesthetic — is used to lose weight, the theory being that if you’re sleeping, you can’t be eating. And it wasn’t just for the idle rich, either. Many a boardroom coup has been engineered over the raw raisin-and-carrot salad, many a trembling minion hauled, quite literally, over hot coals in a steamy sauna. Beethoven’s lengthy stay at a spa in his early years has even been posited as an explanation for his ill-health in later life, the theory being that he imbibed rather too much mineral water and gave himself lead poisoning in the process.
Now every spot-squeezing school leaver with a weekend diploma in exfoliation wants to re-create the atmosphere of a Roman bath in their 8ft by 4ft pre-fab treatment box. There are even cheap shower gels on the market that claim to offer the full “spa experience”. These imposters are giving the real thing a bad name. The one-day spa is anathema, since the benefits of a true spa — isolation, weight loss, detoxification and rest — cannot possibly be achieved in anything under three days, at a minimum cost of £450.
In its true form, the spa is an oasis of peace and quiet, the only place when you can legitimately fall asleep at four in the afternoon without risking instant dismissal. Of course the whole process is self-defeating — if you weren’t so stressed you wouldn’t need to get away from it all; and if it didn’t cost you so much to make yourself feel better, you wouldn’t be so stressed in the first place.
But that’s life, and it was ever thus — after all, it was the ancients who invented the things, presumably to help to deal with the trauma of sitting through a play by Euripides. Bottom line is this: you can get a face peel anywhere; but if you want to peel off for a quiet snooze and a ginger zinger, a spa’s the only place to be.
Sarah Vine
SPA SPEAK
La Stone Therapy
Spiritual and sensory experience for men inspired by desert stones of Arizona. Alternating hot basalt and cold marble stones alleviate strains and tired muscles.
Where? Spa Nk, Westbourne Grove, London W2
Cost £90
