Sins Of The Flesh

Just come back from a sejour at a Michelin 3 star spa in the south of France. Much lighter in wallet and a bit lighter in weight. 

After a delicious menu minceur in the evening, off for a consultation with the doctor in the morning.

Do you eat much sugar, perhaps too much fruit? he asked,  palpating my Rubenesque stomach. Yes, I thought, grapes - especially the fermented variety which comes out of a bottle. Peeved to learn I needed to lose more weight than my husband we went off to the wooden chalet for the treatments.

 

It looked like something out of Hansel and Gretel but without the witch to fatten us up. The rotten eggs smell hit us as we entered.  Warned that the sulphurous water, to be drunk twice daily, could either make you constipated, or the reverse, I asked what the first treatment would be. With a supercilious curl of her French lips Madame replied le bain de boue, or, more prosaically in English, the mud bath. 

“I feel like a right nonce in this bathrobe and slippers,” spouse grumbled as I went in for the first treatment, coyly named filiforme.  More like a ffffiring squad, straight out of a Goya painting. Ahhh! The pain! Hosed with a high pressure jet (think of a Kärcher machine) whilst standing starkers against a wall. An infernal punishment for the crime of getting fat. Reeling from shock, trying to remember the French for instrument of torture I was ushered into another room. The door opened to a metal contraption straight out of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony - an elaborate torture and execution

device that carved the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin as he slowly died. I quailed, wobbling on the white bed as the thing, with its 12 funnels, moved menacingly downwards and the jets started. I knew what would be carved on my stomach-

FATTY!

After that, thank God, the gentler touch of a paintbrush which slathered my prone body in white mud, ready to be lovingly wrapped up in clingfilm  and muslin. Et voila! I was left to baste like some chicken en papillote. I looked up, oh no, Les Mouches! Two of them buzzing around, threatening to crawl into my private cocoon. Ever tried swatting flies with your arms and hands immobilised? 

Quite.

Bilingual blaspheming didn’t work either so I was reduced to snapping my head back and forth and blowing at them furiously. Quite an existential, angst - ridden experience. Not exactly relaxing.

The lovely white mud bath was a welcome treat, like swimming in warm custard. I must have looked a sight, especially when it came to showering it off. Spouse certainly did, when we went in together. Perhaps not best for honeymoon couples...

Privacy in the thermal jets swimming pool allowed me free reign to splash about to my heart’s content. Like a chubby porpoise I contorted my body’s wobbly bits to face the full force of the underwater massage. I’d just turned my back to expose my chubby bottom cheeks, my fesses for a really good pounding and -

Yikes!

Would have looked good on YouTube:-

Woman in spa gets surprise colonic irrigation.

I’ve had a few massages in my time but nothing like the spa special hand and fingers job - like geese pecking my bingo wings and inner thighs. Pride and the cost of it all stopped me from getting up and running out.

Slightly traumatised and exhausted by all the relaxing treatments I sat down to another wonderful calorie controlled meal.

Three Russians on the next table had a slightly different take on their special diet. Ordering bread with every course and eating the table decorations (shiny red apples from the orchard) were definitely not de rigeur. 

“Is that guy with his wife and her sister do you think?”

“Not necessarily.”

Hm. 

After several more sessions and three bouts with a personal trainer we came back glowing with health. 

I really loved that custardy bain de boue. Trouble is, although I forsook them for a week, without withdrawal symptoms, I do rather like my cheese and wine and chocolates...

Stuff it. Perhaps in the next life I’ll come back as a hippopotamus splashing happily in my mud bath and eating away to my hearts’ content.

Parfait!

Anxious thoughts and perfect blogging

Dissertation deadline looms like a black cloud on the horizon.

Pity they don’t do MAs in procrastination- I’d get a first. At least I can keep writing on my blog. My friend Kath writes flash fiction on hers.

There’s lots of advice on how to write a perfect blog on the web....zzzzz.

Perfection can be boring though, at least that’s how I look at it. Here’s something different- a quick flash called  -

Heartfelt Hotel

Taster Menu

A dash of hubris

Pink and grey hooped socks above stout walking boots leading to grey flannel plus fours announced the presence of a serious walker. One confident to stand out from the crowd, as confirmed by the long pigtail tied behind his weathered, sixty year old face.

Geoffrey Berry, standing for attention, greeted the guests with a booming “Good morning.” Satisfied that his presence had been noted, he chose to sit next to the same couple he had regaled over dinner with his hunting, shooting and fishing tales. He was ready, map in hand, to advise them of the best walks in the Shropshire neighbourhood. But first, breakfast.

“I’ll have the bacon, the mushrooms, the black pudding...”

 Geoffrey, like some Shakespearian ham actor, reeled off all the items on the menu. The bemused, tattooed local waitress quietly muttered to herself, “Just say the full English, you pompous old git.”

© © ©

A soupçon of heartache

She glided in behind him, walking in his shadow, as she had done for most of their married life. Head down, handbag clutched in front, she avoided making eye contact with the diners. 

She was invisible.

Sliding quietly into her chair with her back to the room she anxiously examined the menu and sighed.

Phyllis hadn’t really wanted to come. She would have been happier celebrating their anniversary in the Anchor. A nice bit of pork from the carvery suited her better than the fancy food on offer here. Her stomach quailed at the thought of morels veloute, poulpe provencale...

She waited for the details of his forthcoming trip to Paris. Sharon, his pneumatic PA, “invaluable to the business,” would invariably be accompanying him. 

Did he really think she was that stupid?

 Gazing at the chintzy drapes she knew that soon it would be curtains for their marriage as well...

 © © ©

A concoction of humour

They crashed into the dining room with minutes to spare, hair still wet from the shower they’d just shared.

‘Still in time for breakfast, love?’ asked Liam. The waitress frostily indicated a table. Other diners, mostly elderly, looked on, intrigued. 

After last night in the bridal suite they were starving. Jabbing a varnished fingernail, Tracey ordered ‘the lot’, bar the ‘iffy black puddin.’

The love birds, gazing into each other’s eyes, barely noticed their plates arriving. 

‘Yum’ declared Tracey as Liam raised his fork-speared organic sausage. She began to giggle and suggestively nibble his Cumberland’s Traditional, oblivious to the appalled faces, tittering and outraged harrumphs of the onlookers.

 Isabel had seen enough. 

Clearing their table, she accidentally spilt a jug of iced water. 

‘So sorry!’ 

As Liam busily dabbed his crotch with a linen napkin, Isabel resolved to immediately withdraw her hotel from the Daily Chronicle’s ‘Win a honeymoon’ competition.

Now, wash your hands!

“Now, wash your hands!”

I was about seven; we were staying in a guest house.

“Why do they have signs up for that?” 

My mother’s reply...

“Some people are lacking in manners and are ignorant of basic rules of hygiene”. (Well, she was an English teacher and a bit of a snob.)

Fifty years later I am looking a sign in the Ladies toilet at Paphos airport (See above). You can imagine the looks I had trying to take that photo in its dimly -lit confines.

 “If you tried that in the Gents you’d be arrested,” my husband told me.

On Aphrodite’s Isle, for the unsuspecting tourist, the Cypriot lavatorial system can be a bit of a shock. This is true for all of Greece as well.

Do not flush your paper- it must go in the bin - their drainage pipes can’t cope with it. And yet the first flushing toilet was discovered in Knossos, built by the Minoans whose plumbing and drainage were the most developed in the Western World. Come back Archimedes and sort this out for God’s sake! (And the Greek economy too – that is going down the pan)

All deeply, deeply disturbing. Made me feel quite anally retentive.

Talking of which, I remember some other buttock-clenching experiences in my past.

Izal toilet paper, awful stuff, like scratchy tracing paper with a whiff of disinfectant and heaven help you if you used the non- absorbent side.

French toilets, toilettes à la turque i.e the old-fashioned hole in the ground variety where you stand and squat. But you often can’t find a clean place to put your shoes if the previous occupant’s defecation posture has resulted in a mis–squat. In the sixties my family would tour the camp sites of Europe. No matter how long the drive, my mother always insisted on checking the facilities. She was very demanding. If they weren’t up to scratch, we’d move on... 

German toilets have their own peculiar charm – the Inspection Shelf, a porcelain platform to catch deposits that can then be peered at for abnormalities before being flushed away. During my student year in Germany, I learnt that the natives have a robust no-nonsense attitude to bodily functions and the body itself. Their magazine adverts for laxatives were so amazing I had a collection of cuttings to show my fellow students back home.

Another unwelcome scatological memory is that of the Elsan toilet in our garden in South Wales (Well, there were six of us and queuing was a problem). One day an unholy row was going on. Mother, if you excuse the pun, was going ape-shit. My grandfather had substituted dock leaves for toilet paper. Presumably that messed up the chemical break down of the waste. Another bathroom downstairs went in shortly after.

Time to raise the tone I think, and so to end on a literary note I offer the following:-

My favourite story on the subject of Greek toilets is in Gerald Durell’s My Family And Other Animals. His sister, Margo, mistakes the bin of used toilet paper for a clean supply and is totally traumatised as a result.

Now, if that had been my mother the ablutions required afterwards would have put Lady Macbeth’s OCD handwashing totally and utterly, in the shade.