Spa Therapy
Back from a long weekend at Ragdale Hall, a fabulous health hydro and spa in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. It's an extremely comfortable and comforting retreat: a health, relaxation, and distinctly female-oriented place, although a few intrepid males were there, mostly brought by spouses as far as I could tell.
My time was divided between the gym, the thermal spa with its many little rooms designed as variations on the theme of steam and sauna and pool, and also a few treatments, one of which was very luxurious indeed and involved me being wrapped in mud (not just any old mud, moroccan spice mud in fact) and having a number of post-mudwrap treatments too: it lasted two hours altogether and is the kind of thing I'd have hated when younger but now really appreciated. Even my overactive mind and stressfully internalised to-do list had to quieten down by the end of my stay, though it took a while and still last night I was dreaming of all the impossible-to-prepare-for-adequately seminars and presentations lined up ahead of me. I really feel the benefits of it today though.
These are wonderful places, I think, although I know one could easily dismiss them as indulgent expensive nonsense. They're hedonistic in that they cater for the needs of the body, yet the higher purpose is one of well being rather than weight loss or beautification or fitness excellence in themselves. Strange, I found myself thinking, how the thermal spa architecture resembled in a way that of a big church or a cathedral, with its side chapels of candle-lit or aroma-filled steam or water zones around a central pool or stream of water. You go into these little 'sanctuary spots' and there is nothing to do but sit and be still, aware of the sensory elements offered such as soft background music or warm scented air. I loved the rose petal sauna which seemed to enclose one as if it were a cocoon.
Most of these little spaces had 'please be silent' notices on their glass doors, also mimicking the instructions one might get on side chapel doors in a more explicitly sacred place. The whole of the spa was constructed as a journey, with visitors (pilgrims?) invited to select, hold and cast into the stream a pebble at the start of their experience, to symbolise the casting aside of negative emotions. Especially if you're alone in one of the little rooms it's almost like being in your own tropical anchorhold. One sits and absorbs the heat and scent and light. What to do with one's mind? All shall be well, I found I was repeating to myself; All shall be well.
I couldn't really take a book into those spaces with me, but I did have for reading at other moments another of my short story anthologies: this one 'The Secret Self: a century of short stories by Women'; edited and with a good critically informed introduction by Hermione Lee. I've enjoyed nearly all of them so far - had to smile (painfully) at the unfortunate adulterous couple in Edith Wharton's 'Souls Belated' whose relationship gradually fractures as fundamentally different perspectives emerged, previously obscured because 'there was a lucidity in her intuitions that made them appear to be the result of reasoning'. Is there really such a difference though? And the equally painful sacrifice of the husband in Katherine Mansfield's 'Man without a Temperament' who leaves his home and lifestyle to accompany his sick wife in her convalescent hotel lodgings abroad. Some things, one guesses, a girl should really do on her own. Health hydros perhaps being one of them.
Finally on the short story front, Jean Rhys' 'Let them call it jazz'; indefinably wonderful writing. That little song overheard in Holloway prison which turned out to be a means of escape and survival for the hapless exploited wine-drinking speaker - I've never heard it of course, but I can't forget it either. I'm reminded of a Guardian blog from the other week which compares Jean Rhys' life with that of Amy Winehouse, both extraordinarily creative women crippled and addled by addiction. Perhaps so. Certainly the irrepressible and constantly mutating lilt of jazz has an echo in this story as well as in Winehouse's music. I wonder what they would have made, or would make, of the detox, though not exactly rehab, ambience of Ragdale.
My time was divided between the gym, the thermal spa with its many little rooms designed as variations on the theme of steam and sauna and pool, and also a few treatments, one of which was very luxurious indeed and involved me being wrapped in mud (not just any old mud, moroccan spice mud in fact) and having a number of post-mudwrap treatments too: it lasted two hours altogether and is the kind of thing I'd have hated when younger but now really appreciated. Even my overactive mind and stressfully internalised to-do list had to quieten down by the end of my stay, though it took a while and still last night I was dreaming of all the impossible-to-prepare-for-adequately seminars and presentations lined up ahead of me. I really feel the benefits of it today though.
These are wonderful places, I think, although I know one could easily dismiss them as indulgent expensive nonsense. They're hedonistic in that they cater for the needs of the body, yet the higher purpose is one of well being rather than weight loss or beautification or fitness excellence in themselves. Strange, I found myself thinking, how the thermal spa architecture resembled in a way that of a big church or a cathedral, with its side chapels of candle-lit or aroma-filled steam or water zones around a central pool or stream of water. You go into these little 'sanctuary spots' and there is nothing to do but sit and be still, aware of the sensory elements offered such as soft background music or warm scented air. I loved the rose petal sauna which seemed to enclose one as if it were a cocoon.
Most of these little spaces had 'please be silent' notices on their glass doors, also mimicking the instructions one might get on side chapel doors in a more explicitly sacred place. The whole of the spa was constructed as a journey, with visitors (pilgrims?) invited to select, hold and cast into the stream a pebble at the start of their experience, to symbolise the casting aside of negative emotions. Especially if you're alone in one of the little rooms it's almost like being in your own tropical anchorhold. One sits and absorbs the heat and scent and light. What to do with one's mind? All shall be well, I found I was repeating to myself; All shall be well.
I couldn't really take a book into those spaces with me, but I did have for reading at other moments another of my short story anthologies: this one 'The Secret Self: a century of short stories by Women'; edited and with a good critically informed introduction by Hermione Lee. I've enjoyed nearly all of them so far - had to smile (painfully) at the unfortunate adulterous couple in Edith Wharton's 'Souls Belated' whose relationship gradually fractures as fundamentally different perspectives emerged, previously obscured because 'there was a lucidity in her intuitions that made them appear to be the result of reasoning'. Is there really such a difference though? And the equally painful sacrifice of the husband in Katherine Mansfield's 'Man without a Temperament' who leaves his home and lifestyle to accompany his sick wife in her convalescent hotel lodgings abroad. Some things, one guesses, a girl should really do on her own. Health hydros perhaps being one of them.
Finally on the short story front, Jean Rhys' 'Let them call it jazz'; indefinably wonderful writing. That little song overheard in Holloway prison which turned out to be a means of escape and survival for the hapless exploited wine-drinking speaker - I've never heard it of course, but I can't forget it either. I'm reminded of a Guardian blog from the other week which compares Jean Rhys' life with that of Amy Winehouse, both extraordinarily creative women crippled and addled by addiction. Perhaps so. Certainly the irrepressible and constantly mutating lilt of jazz has an echo in this story as well as in Winehouse's music. I wonder what they would have made, or would make, of the detox, though not exactly rehab, ambience of Ragdale.
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