Is it just ME?

Or are spas super-stressful?

WE sign up, lured by advertising which paints them as a cross between hospital procedures and sinful luxury.

‘ Channel the ancient healing miracle of fermented beeswax! Let our nuclear ceramide massage oils bring back your youthful skin!’ We’re hooked.

But, waiting to be summoned into a scented cubicle by some sweet young thing in a white coat, we fight a rising unease: we’re trapped.

Nikkibelle or Sharleanette is smiling and softly-spoken, but there is still something of the torture chamber about it.

She tells us to ‘pop off’ our clothes, and hands us a pair of truly appalling bouffant paper panties in exchange. Then it begins.

Yes, many women find it relaxing: like a horse groomed by an ostler. But some of us are the restless horse that stamps and jerks at its tether. Some of us are simply natural resisters. We don’t like being handled by people we’re not likely to set up home with. We brace ourselves against the massage. ‘Ooh,’ says Nikkibelle, digging her knuckles in. ‘You’re tense!’

‘Yes,’ we mutter inwardly. ‘And whose fault is that?’

The only treatments I have ever enjoyed are seaweed wraps, because I can fool myself I am lying on a beach and being buried in the sand for fun.

Whatever the result, there is always an element of worrying surrender about spa treatments. My daughter once had a bad facial from a girl fresh out of training at what was mainly an agricultural college.

On arriving home she kept feeling her face, convinced it had been dragged out of shape by the farm-honed fingers of the beautician.

I suspect they’d both have preferred a day mucking out the cow shed. Far more relaxing!

She tells us to pop off our clothes and hands us a pair of bouffant paper panties. Then it begins...