What I Learnt at the Spa

Scrubs and Snake Oil

Spas in some form or another have always been with us. The romans had baths complexes, the Georgians organised their social lives around ‘ taking the waters. Edward VII was always poppling off to Baden Baden to recover from his foie gras habit. Somerset Maugham famously went to a Swiss spa to be injected with monkey glands and came back as springy as a ‘ mountain goat”. But the odd pandemic aside, those of us fortunate enough to live in developed countries with modern medicine are healthier than at any time in history and yet spas are more popular than ever. What used to be a noun has now become a very expensive verb.

I am so old that my first venture into the world of wellness was to what used to be called a health farm – Shrublands in Suffolk, famous for the scene in Thunderball where Sean Connery was nearly pulled in two on a traction table . went with my friend Jo Coles , who is now a new York media mogul with a platinum pixie cut, but thirty years ago was a red head working for the Guardian and having her colours done ( she was an autumn). I had a small child, and Jo had a high maintenance boyfriend so we decided to book ourselves in for a three day break. This was the early nineties, and Shrublands was still basking in its mid sixties glory. The highlight were the sauna cabinets where your head poked out of the top. Bond used them to melt his opponents, Jo and I got very red in the face. The food was old fashioned diet food – lettuce no dressing, cottage cheese, and grapefruit segments. Our plummeting blood sugar made us scratchy and we had quite the spat about a spare grape. The ‘ treatments’ were hard core – they didn’t put me on the rack, but I did have my legs dipped in paraffin wax and lost half an inch from both. I was given a massage by a fifty something man with hands the size of shovels. He had a strong Yorkshire accent and wore his white coat as if it were a high viz jacket. He told me that he had been a miner for twenty years , but when the pit closures started he decided to retrain as a masseur. I asked him if he enjoyed his work. There was a long pause as he dug his enormous hands into my scapula, “ it’s a job’, he said finally.

There was no ambient music at Shrublands, or incense burners, or crystals under the massage table. It was a place where James Bond could recover his mojo. Sadly the end of the cold War meant that the supply of hard men in search of sauna cabinets was drying up and Shrublands went out of business a few years later. I hope my miner masseur found fresh flesh to pummel.

My next encounter with the world of wellness was courtesy of the Daily Mail. Would you like to go to a place in Germany where they starve you for a week? How could I resist? This establishment described itself as a ‘clinic’, which meant that the vibe was medical rather than woo woo. The décor was ( still is) stark white and light blue, the walls covered in family photographs of the doctor who had founded the clinic in the 1920’s together with his descendants who were still running the place. I was there for ten days of which six were liquids only. On day two I developed the worst headache I have ever had and started to vomit up the vegetable soup that was my only nourishment. The clinic’s solution was to send a nurse who tucked me up in bed with a hot water bottle strapped to my liver. By Day Six the headache had gone, and I started to feel the fasting ‘glow’that the staff talked about. I felt lighter, emptier and for the first time in my life food felt irrelevant. I could walk through the streets of the nearby town which was bursting with strudel and doughnuts without a pang. It made me understand why all hardcore religions have a fasting element. I didn’t see any actual visions but I felt vision adjacent. If an angel had tapped me on the shoulder I wouldn’t have been at all surprised. I experienced a mental floatiness that blurred my rational self. During a Tibetan gong massage where the therapist struck metal bowls which were placed on different parts of my body, I started to cry. Were the tears the result of blood chemistry or my subconscious unknotting itself? I have no idea, but I do know that I have never felt so outside myself before or since.

On the night when I had my first solid food for six days the waiter lit a candle and I felt tearfully grateful, as if I had just won the school prize for religious knowledge. At my final weigh in I discovered that I had lost seven kilos ( around 15 pounds), which is a lot. The best thing about the fast was that it severed my dependence on alcohol. I still drink the odd glass of champagne, or a teeny weeny dry martini, but the days of swigging back the lady petrol are over.

Advocates of fasting claim that it has all kinds of beneficial effects on your health – as I found a tumour in my left breast two months after my visit to the clinic I couldn’t possibly comment. I think everyone who wants to should try a medically supervised fast at least once in their lives just to see what it feels like. Just don’t confuse abstinence with virtue.

A few years later I was persuaded by a friend to go with him to another spa. This was also in Germany but while the fasting clinic felt like a rather down at heel prep school, this spa was in the five star hotel category, oozing with cashmere blankets and lavatories with heated seats and unexpected water jets. The fasting clinic was full of creatives – I met the legendary Nouvelle vague film maker Agnes Varda with her dip dyed hair on one trip – the Lanserhof clientele leans towards caramel lowlights and diamond tennis bracelets. I sat next to Victoria Beckham in the IV room, at least I think it was her – the baseball cap and the dark glasses were something of a signifier.

This clinic was all about digestive health. You drankk Epsom salts every day which emptied you out, and then you ate small meals where you were encouraged to chew each mouthful sixty times. As the evening meal wasusually soup, this was challenging. Apart from the soup I ate sheep’s yoghurt and buckwheat toast at every meal.

The Austrian doctor at this clinic looked at my blood test and told me that she was concerned about my ‘heavy metals’. Apparently this is a thing, or at least it was in 2019. She thought it might be a good idea to have all my mercury fillings taken out to stop the Iron Maiden party going on in my bloodstream. I am not medically qualified in any way, but I can diagnose the totally unnecessary. Luckily I am not a hypochondriac which is a good thing because these places can inflame existential flickerings into serious conflagrations. She also prescribed every kind of vitamin drip she could think of. After a few of these I realised that they were a supremely expensive way of adding vitamins to your pee. I felt no benefit at all. Ditto cryotherapy where you spend ninety seconds in three progressively colder chambers wearing a fetching combo of swimsuit, hat, gloves and bootees. A swim in cold water is more fun and a hundred times more invigorating, oh and it’s free. Also to be avoided is the ‘therapy ‘where you put your feet in some water with a copper element and the water turns black – this is meant to be the toxins leaving your body but any one with a GCSE in chemistry would contest this. I have no truck with mud baths or clay masks or any thing which is meant to draw out impurities. It feels quite pleasant to be suspended in a kind of sou vide covered in mud, but I can think of better things to do with 140 euros.

In the German speaking countries a week or so at one of these clinics every so often is part of your health insurance of the basis that prevention is better than a cure. I think most people could benefit from a week or so spent not drinking, smoking or eating crap and being pampered and soothes. It is a welcome respite from normal life, and I have had some of my best ideas lying face down on a massage table. But and this isn’t said enough in the world of wellness… rest, fresh air and small amounts of nutritious food in a beautiful setting is what counts. I love tactile therapies like massages, scrubs or facials from someone with healing hands, but all these souped up medical type treaments like IV drips, cryotherapy, vampire facials and dare I say it colonic irrigation are little better than snake oil. Save the money and buy some of those sheepskin Birkenstocks and banish the heavy metals.