So Michael's German (and an Ossie at that). For this reason I have spent many days of my life naked in various hot naked rooms. This, together with a year spent displaying my white skin to the shocked onsens of Japan has transformed me from a heat and nudity averse Irish girl to a confident spa siren. To a point where they are now well and truly essential to my existence. But they're so goddamn expensive in London. Like they're supposed to be a luxury reserved for the River Cafe classes rather than a basic human right.
Which is what makes Spa London such a breath of fresh (eucalyptus-scented) air. Look, its web address is even a .org, so it's officially a charity, selflessly devoting its life to forcing miserable, overworked Londoners to bloody well just chill out and cheer up. It even says so itself...
Me and Michael are now trying to go here every few months or so as part of our intense programme to live and work in London and stay (in some way) sane. We think of it as some kind of garden area for our flat. It's just down the road, is a very reasonable £18.50 a three-hour session, and is perfectly adequate for our needs. So you can't have a mojito (you wouldn't want one anyway, you'd die) and you can't sit on a roof terrace (you wouldn't want to anyway, it's just off Mare Street) and you can't have a gourmet lunch (unless paninis do it for you) but it's got everything you could possibly want in a little spa escape. Two steam rooms, a sauna, a plunge pool, buckets of ice, even an authentically tiled tepidarium and caledarium. Tepidarium. That word always makes me laugh. Like they should also have a Littlebitchillyarium and perhaps a Fuckinghelli'mhallucinatingarium too.
There's even a little chill out area where you can drink cucumber water, read Triathlon monthly and sit on a big wet patch that someone else left behind on the comfy chairs. Well spas do bring people closer together.
We're very happy we found this place. To be honest, I'd pay the £18.50 just to shuffle around in a fluffy white robe and slippers for three hours (though I feel the NHS could arrange that for me for nothing). Last night when we emergd into the evening sun of Bethnal Green we were so relaxed we couldn't even hear the police sirens any more. The run down pubs took on a new quaint charm. The herring salad I bought from the Russian shop on Cambridge Heath Road looked not like a foul array of food-coloured pickled sourness, but like an amazing exotic treat (it subsequently gave me heartburn). We're now just hoping not too many other people find out about our little bubble in the blocks of concrete.
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