Go on, let yourself go

Fiona Barber has freed herself from the beauty treadmill and is instead concentrating on feeling good.

“S he’s let herself go.”

How many times have you heard it? Maybe you’ve even said it.

These days I’m living it, which is why I feel qualified to tell you where it is you actually go, when you let yourself go.

Turns out it’s a very nice place indeed. It’s a retreat where you can cast adrift assumptions that your body is a full-time problem in need of constant remedies, therapies and improvements.

Here, at Withering Heights Spa & Bar, you can raise two fingers to the beautniks who insist that cellulite, wrinkles, grey hair, body hair and anything else they decree is “unsightly” must be expunged.

You can thumb your nose at self-declared arbiters of acceptability who decide it’s not enough to swim the harbour, run a marathon or work as a labourer for eight hours a day; you must also take care of, you know, those pesky “problem areas” and wear just the right colour foundation. You see, fit and healthy isn’t enough – actually, whatever you do won’t ever be enough when there is fear to monger and products and services to peddle.

And you can studiously ignore the high priests of hokum who proffer advice about how to grow old gracefully (what does that even mean?). Instead, go get a tattoo on the orange-peel unseemliness that is your thigh.

At Withering Heights we also have our own terminology. Here, “anti-ageing” means we can’t be bothered leaving that bottle of red in the wine rack for a year or two. Off with the top and let’s have a glass now! “Problem areas” are places where you can’t swim because there’s too much poo in the water, “banish grey” means clearing the shelves of those crimes against literature – the Fifty Shades erotic atrocities (eroticies?) – and a “six-pack” really means cans of the cold stuff.

It’s not as though I’ve ceremoniously burned all my beauty products and resorted to an embellishment-free existence, a la The Handmaid’s Tale. Who doesn’t like a bit of lippy, perfume and the feel of moisturiser on the skin? It’s just that life’s pretty sweet when you concentrate on health and wellness, resist all the beauty badgering and stop buying into designed-forprofit anti-ageing battles you were never biologically designed to win.

I heartily recommend a long, relaxing stay at Withering Heights. Maybe you could let yourself go there too.