Yesterday I paid a woman 40 euros to massage my breasts.
In a recent bid to achieve total inner harmony, I’ve been visiting a local beautician. Firstly, the pedicure, involving the sitting in one of those magical spa massage chair things, feet soaked, scrubbed and rubbed, before being buffed to perfection and painted candy-apple red. I really hate painting and shaping my own toenails; something about being bent in half and trying to remain steady reminds me of just how inflexible and awkward I am. So pedicures is among my list of things I prefer to pay other people to do.
I know people who don’t clean their own houses, do their own washing or even their own ironing. Tasks involving hot steam and bleach based cleansers send me into a zen-like meditation; and after 9 years in a private school, I know a thing or two about ironing a shirt and a box pleat ankle-length wool skirt. I find huge satisfaction in the whiteness of the tiles in a freshly bleached shower recess. I am more than a little bit Lady Macbeth with her whole ‘out damn spot’ psychology; immaculate ceramic basins can offset bloody spots on the psyche.
Fierce, innate independence leads to a very short list of things that I pay other people to do that I cannot do for myself. I hem my own skirts, cut my own hair (it is curly, so nigh on impossible to mess up) and ‘dry clean only’ is rich people speak for cannot be bothered to handwash, so I do that as well.
Short and sweet, but here it is:
- Espresso – you cannot achieve a halfway decent Espresso without a Ferrari of a machine comprising an enormous steam boiler. I am not yet willing to invest my lifesavings in a machine that has the same capacity to boil over as I do, so it is plunger coffee at home and the greasy bubbly good stuff from a greasy bubbly good professional barista
- Paint my toes – see above
- Pluck my eyebrows – if you have ever tried to sit still, hold a magnifying mirror to your eye and jam pointed steel tweezers at your eyeball while wearing glasses and trying not to sneeze, you’d know why. The magnifying mirror is like a window into every single spot you’ve ever had on your face, I’d rather lie back, close my eyes and live in ignorance of the ruddiness of my skin complexion
- Drive – alright, I never learned, so I guess this doesn’t really count as I have no alternative except for the Weetro; but when in summer the smell becomes overwhelmingly nose bleeding, baby you can drive my car
- Listen – fiercely protective of the blood spotted intricacies of my own emotional landscape, I am a staunch supporter of psychotherapy. Besides, I haven’t yet managed to find a living soul in my life whom I haven’t at some time or another wanted to grievously injure, so the safe option is to engage the services of a third party bound by the rules of doctor patient confidentiality
- Rub and oil my skin – there is nothing more luxuriously indulgent than a massage
Starting around 10 years ago, working as a waitress forced to carry about 400 hamburgers high above her head every night, I would regularly go to a beauty salon to lie on a table and have someone rub all of the weariness out of my tired soul. I’ve done it many times, in many countries, but yesterday was my first foray into the French technique; a real eye-opener.
Usually, you enter the room, remove all but your Reg Grundys and lie, face down, on a table with a conveniently located hole designed to prevent you from suffocating. When Rosa entered the room, the first thing she asked me to do was turn over. Odd I thought, but hey, maybe she was going to rub away my thighs.
She did, for about 10 minutes, and my calves, and my toes, and then, walked around the table to stand behind my head. I lifted myself to turn over, but before I could she folded the towel down to below my hips. At that moment, every muscle in my body clenched, reversing any positive effects of afore mentioned thigh and calf rubbing.
I thought that massages were designed to help you relax? How can one relax when they a lying on a table with their belly and breasts exposed and more than just a little bit chilly?
Still, I closed my eyes, listened to the panpipe massage music and focussed on breathing evenly, and relaxing. She oiled up my tummy and did her thing. That was bad enough, having someone rub their hands all over the one part of your body you’ve spent years pretending didn’t exist… and then she ran her hands over my breasts.
It took every ounce of restraint I could muster to not sit up straight, cover myself and bolt. But there you have it, when you get a massage in France; even your mammary glands benefit. I didn’t know that there was any muscle tissue inside a breast, so I remain wholly unconvinced that there is any true de-stressing advantage to doing this, but hey, when in Rome…
Fortunately, the massage took place in the basement, so I could focus on the ancient, relaxing stone walls around me.
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