Earthly Pleasures by Nick Maes
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I have seen another world; perhaps I’ve touched a place that belongs to the future. Women in white tunics whisper softly and streams of faint music attempt to soothe troubled souls. I’ve visited sanctuaries where guests act elderly regardless of their age. Everyone’s reality changes when surrendered at a health farm. You’re not allowed to think for yourself anymore.
Powerscourt, my first port of call, is set in the gentle hills of County Wicklow, an hour’s drive from Dublin. I was the only man in a room full of women awaiting therapy. Scented air wafted with the piped music – a classical tinnitus that haunted the building. Talk was hushed, increasing the sense that we were residents in a futuristic old folk’s home. ‘Nurse’ came in and, sotto voce, calls for an absentee Mary. The truant returned, spoke with ‘nurse’ and looked confused because she wasn’t needed after all. ‘Nurse’ had whispered May, not Mary. Another patient was on the missing list; either she’d gone off the idea of having her treatment or quite forgotten it – it’s easily done. “But, I’m here for a polish,” piped up someone else quite independently. It is official; dermalogical dementia is catching.
Ten past five was the optimum time for therapy when the room vacated en masse for pedicures and the like. I let the stampede of terry towelling pass before following slowly in their wake to a treatment room. Lights are dimmed and I’m given an elaborate and invigorating salt scrub before a comforting film of warm mud is trowelled across my back. Then I was trussed up in clingfilm and left to suppurate in the diffused room. My mind emptied and I nod off into a peculiar dream world until the therapist returns and removes the slurry. I’m told the mud used in my massage has been dredged from a seabed in the South of France and contains all sorts of wonderful minerals. The mulch of fish pooh and bio-organics did me the power of good.
In another clinical room I lie prone on a surgical bed while my feet were seen to. I’m given “Now” magazine to read but snap out of the delirium brought on by Atomic Kitten’s fashion secrets and watch with interest as my feet are plunged into hot paraffin wax – the liquid cools and becomes opaque. My extremities looked plastic, or worse, stone dead, as if the first six inches of me have been embalmed. I was left to contemplate pastoral muzac and Liz Hurley before the wax was removed and my newly soft feet revealed.
I escaped down a corridor and on the spur of the moment decide to relax in the Tranquillity Room. In adjusting my eyes to the sudden darkness, I accidentally knocked a switch plunging the becalmed inmates into a sudden fury of light. I fumbled for the switch and eventually found my way to a daybed besieged by the taped crashing of a distant ocean. It’s not easy doing nothing.
Next day, I join two women dressed in pink tracksuits, stout boots and all weather anoraks for a guided walk. We meandered along curling lanes catching sight of huge vistas and bigger skies through the hedgerows. We had been regularly told to be aware in case a car should approach. (Our guide is touchingly overprotective, perhaps his wages are docked should he carelessly lose or kill a guest.) I ask my pink companions if they’re enjoying themselves – they are, very much. They had been, they said on a detox programme, but after three bottles of wine with dinner last night they were now feeling thoroughly retoxed. We parted company and two happy, hung-over women roamed around the glens while I found a bus to take me on the two-hour trip to Horseleap.
Westmeath County gets so cold that the trees have taken to wearing thick winter coats of poison ivy and country walls shiver under meagre blankets of moss. I was sensibly kitted out in a dense shearling coat; the camp luxuriance of which made me feel like a transvestite in civvies and seemed to attract disapproving bleats from its shivering, but living cousins the other side of the hedge.
Along a pretty lane was Temple Spa, an 18th-century converted farmhouse tucked in an elemental landscape strewn with tumps of gorse and larger barrows. Staff here dressed as nurses, too, and I began to feel geriatric again.
This time I asked for frivolous beauty treatments rather than the holistic procedures on offer. My search for outer beauty wouldn’t be thwarted by a righteous quest for inner peace. The ‘Optimiser Facial’ was promised to lift everything. My face was scrubbed and atomised with a mist of essential oils. Then, after much pleasurable rubbing and an in-depth session removing all the blackheads from my nose, I was slathered with a firming mask. Gauze was anchored about my face and tightened until I looked like a bank robber engaging in a skincare routine.
Next was yoga. On entering the room I discover the teacher standing nonchalantly on her head. She said, with the calming computerised tone of Hal in 2001 a Space Odyssey: “allow the floor to accept your back,” and I did. We performed an exercise that shaped our bodies into right angles; and I was told, with the conviction of a livestock auctioneer, that I was in possession of an “intelligent spine.” I took that to be compliment.
Temple Spa was clearly prone to music, too, but instead of a constant classical drone we were treated to The Ocarina Quartet of Connemara, Tooting on the Bolivian Nose Pipes of Peace, Volume 6. This was strictly for the yoga room, an otherwise quiet place that captured the sun when it shone. I did not feel quite so soothed, however, when I caught sight of a scalp on the floor. I feared the mess of tangled hair was the result of a sudden attack of alopecia bought on by a stressful stretching session, but I was reassured when the hirsute scrunchie was reclaimed and reattached by its owner.
On leaving the changing room Crano Sacral therapy awaited me – “a gentle non-invasive manipulative technique” according to my therapist. She then went on to gently chatter about blocked chakras and the like. I presumed the idea was to put me into a trance because her purling voice made me comatose. In my insensible state, I grunted approving noises when she seemed to expect an answer. In return she tweaked my feet, dowsed my head and then tinkered with every other part of my body. This was fine to begin with, very relaxing, but after a while the novelty began to pall. In fact it seemed like I was under her non-invasive hands for hours, my back stiffened and I got bored; a reflection on me rather that her.
The old-timer within got the better of me because I had no idea what I was doing next. I got the feeling they were used to folk getting bewildered around here because they escorted me to my next session – a seaweed wrap. I asked if swim-trunks were suitable attire and was shown the alternative – disposable incontinence pants. I resisted.
I was scruffed, scuffed, scroffed and exfoliated with salt, then mummified in the slightly whiffy seaweed glue. Like the mud at Powerscourt, the seaweed here has a French pedigree. Apparently the Irish equivalent had a rancid smell and blocked the drains; a case of Gaul winning over Erin in the beauty product stakes. I was left to perspire on a heated bed, sandwiched under a nylon duvet.
When my therapist started telling me that “the best celebrities are the Beckhams,” it struck me that “Now” magazine was pretty big in this part of the world too. I showered off the green gunge and salty residue and felt good.
Then it was back to the treatment rooms for a final session, this time an LA stone massage. This involves being rubbed with hot basalt rocks and cold marble pebbles. But it is a noisy process because the lubricated stones inevitably shoot out of oily hands and crash onto the shelf as the masseuse tries to dispose of them carefully. I wasn’t wholly convinced by the nature of a rub with a rock, but have to admit the experience was wonderful. I got totally stoned.