Mud, mud, glorious mud!

Have you ever had a prize that has become memorable for the wrong reason? A prize I won a few years ago was a perfect example of this.

The prize was a day of pampering and treatments at a small town-centre health club. I felt a bit uncomfortable when I realised that I was the only customer, but I soon got used to having a team of personal staff and had a wonderfully relaxing day. Until it came to the final treatment…….

The idea was to lie in a bath of water mixed with a bucketful of seaweed puree, and in a darkened room be pummelled by intense underwater jets that moved gradually up and down the body. The beautician said that this would make more blood flow towards my heart (from where exactly???) and collect particles of undigested food on the way, which it would excrete through my lymph glands. I kept as straight a face as I could, while surreptitiously checking my armpits for signs of my lunch emerging.

Despite that, the treatment was very relaxing and I was almost asleep when the new trainee beautician, on her first day at work, came to tell me that my time was up.

“Do I need to switch this machine off?” I asked.

“No,” she replied, “the beautician will be along soon to do that,” and departed to let me dress in privacy.

However the underwater jets were stronger than I thought – just as I finished dressing, the ones which should have been pummelling my back started up, squirting half a dozen powerful jets of seaweed slurry straight into the air! I was soaked, and the walls and ceiling were covered in a thick brown sludge – oozing down the walls and dripping off the pictures and mirrors!

Thank goodness it was my last treatment, I couldn’t get away fast enough! And something tells me that the trainee beautician was probably not far behind me!

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