Dorothy, the spouse, accompanies hubby to a partners' retreat ... She gets the "treatments" at a beauty salon ... Creams and gels ... Electrification ... Deforestation ... Oxygenation ... Red light therapy ... Did the partner notice? ... Dorothy blogs
Last weekend I returned to the site of the partners retreat, this time in my capacity as spouse.
Lolling about in a subtropical resort is lovely I suppose, if you like that sort of thing, but frankly, after a couple of cups of coffee and the paper, there wasn't much to do.
Mothering didn't look like much of an option: it was raining with cyclonic enthusiasm and the children had that "thank-God-its-raining-I-am-going-to-spend-the-whole-day-playing-on-my-laptop-that-the-school-made-my-parents-buy-for-me" look about them.
So I ventured into a nearby shopping centre, saw what used to be called a beauty parlour and, on making enquiries, was told by a delighted war bride with a surgically enhanced look of surprise about her that, as luck would have it, she had just had two cancellations.
She examined my skin, not all that closely actually, told me I needed a facial and that she had had one only yesterday and it made her look 20 years younger. Which would put her at about 80.
But she did have good skin.
This would be the second facial I have had in my life.
And what a strange experience it was.
My hostess, who I must say did a remarkable job deforesting what used to be my brow line, gave a garbled explanation of the various "treatments" I would be lucky enough to be the recipient of.
No prices were provided, for reasons I would discover later, but the treatments sounded so alluringly peculiar, so filled with acronyms and talk of lights and electric currents, that I could not resist.
It seems facials have gone techo.
Many creams and gels were applied, eleven I think, each of which did a subtly different but extremely important job, and had to be followed up with a hot towel.
Then we got to the "treatments".
There was electrification, which involved applying an electric current through two metal rollers (think tennis court, only two inches long) that were rolled with excruciating slowness over one's heavily creamed skin to the sound of the more soothing parts of Beethoven's ninth - the bits stolen in the Wizard of Oz.
I had to hold a negative earthing thingy in my left hand (rod of metal) so the current ran through me, she explained.
I could tell it was running through me because my wedding ring started to zing in anticipation, no doubt, of what would transpire when spouse saw me later.
Then we had the "oxygenation". This was particularly good because it was "antibacterial".
Why one would need an antibacterial treatment for an non-invasive "treatment" was not explained, but I suppose that if it sells detergent, it must sell facials.
The oxygenation involved another stick thingy attached to an electric current making a buzzing noise as it was waved in the region of my face. For a long time. To a soothing Christmas tune about holly. In March.
Who knows if oxygen was coming out of the wand. Certainly there was no whoosh of air - that would have been drying - but it made an impressively scientific buzzing sound as all that oxygen penetrated the "eight layers of the dermis".
This was topped off by the piece de resistance: the "LED treatment". More soothing music - by now we had left Christmas and moved to the Four Seasons - and she covered my eyes with a couple of cotton pads and announced with some drama that she had to leave the room to get the "machine".
When she returned, making clunking sounds behind my head as the door opened and closed, she revealed the machine and turned it on so I could get a preview.
It was like 2001 A Space Odyssey only scarlet that blazed before me. Three flat metal plates with red lights dotted on it, which shone like the lights you need for night tennis, only - as I have already said - scarlet.
Goggles were placed on my eyes, the bed I was on was elevated (electrically - think dentist only flat) so that my face was sort of inserted into a blast of red light.
Through the goggles I could detect the blaze of red. She massaged other bits of me (hands, feet) while the red worked its way through my optical nerves and, if she is to be believed, my skin.
At the conclusion of this marathon, my skin felt more moist, no doubt because of the gallons of creams which had been applied, the forest had been considerably denuded, in many places, and I was considerably poorer.
Those machines don't come cheap.
I went back to our hotel room. The children looked up briefly from the virtual mayhem they were inflicting via the school laptops.
"What happened to your eyebrows?" one of them asked.
Ignoring them, as only a working mother can, I made a cup of tea and waited expectantly for spouse to return from the beige windowless room.
I looked at him, expectantly, from my glowing face.
"Hullo," he said, somewhat confused by the fixed look.
"Notice anything different?" I asked.
He looked about nervously and frowned.
This, he knows, can only end badly.