It seems so long since the NeverTooLate Girl was in town. So much so, that it's only just now that I realised I had completed one of the items on my never-to-late list without knowing - I had a spa weekend.
Not a weekend technically, as we hit the hydro for two nights mid-week but the principle remains the same - a couple of days of R&R with thoughts of work and study allowed to slowly fade into the background. Though as the masseuse climbed on to the couch and tied my lower body in a knot (believe me, it felt like she'd got me in a double sheep shank) memories of the Russian team masseuse at the European Masters Swim Championships in Ukraine last September started to flood back. I made sure my sobs were very, very quiet. But as ever, when she had finished with me and I slowly slid off the couch and checked my legs weren't broken, I realised how good I actually felt. Clearly pain and I have a worryingly symbiotic connection.
On a Take a Friend for Free package (it's not exactly free, but it is a good ploy to get you there) organised by my good buddy H, I was returning to Ragdale Hall four years after my first visit. God, where does time go? Ragdale looked the same. I unfortunately had suffered some ravages of time. This was my attempt to undo mother nature's relentless routemarch and try to put back at least a couple of things which seemed to be heading in the wrong direction. Did it work? It did. For a couple of days. A late night out last night with friends and camping in a not-yet-finished new-build with no facilities seems to have undone the good works of the previous week. I slipped on my sunglasses as soon as I got out of bed. Thank god for accessories.
Ragdale Hall is about 8 miles from Melton Mowbray and about 13 miles from Leicester. For those of you with poor geography, cut off Scotland, Wales and the SW and Leicester is just about in the middle of what is left. The Hall is set in open countryside and if you turn around at the entrance and look back there is a long and beautiful unobstructed view across rolling fields and into the distance. The immediate grounds of the Hall are kind of nice too. What Ragdale gets right and sets it apart I understand from some other spas (this is intelligence from my spa-going friends, I unfortunately don't get the opportunity to have this sort of pampering very often) is the quality of service you get from the staff. With the exception of waiting an age to be seated in the restaurant at lunch time (more about this later), the staff were fabulous. Polite, attentive, good at their jobs. Which given that it's a sort of pampering conveyor belt (I mean this in the nicest possible way) and they all get to see probably a dozen different people a day, or more, the staff remain surprisingly cheerful, friendly and relaxed. Yes, there is a bit of standard patter before each treatment but that goes with the territory. All in all it is an extremely efficient and professionally run operation that still manages to make you feel like an individual. To the point that even after a four year gap I was greeted like a regular. Or maybe it was because my mate is, she's a three-or-four times a year gal at Ragdale. I may well just have been the lucky recipient of reflected super-client attention.
The first things I noticed following the four year gap between my last visit and this weren't the rather swish new clothes boutique or the new facilities. But rather: one, that there were markedly more men than previously and two, how much fatter on average the women were. I don't think this is an error of memory. The women were bigger. MUCH bigger. Interestingly on the Ragdale website the images they show are women who are, well....... young, attractive and SLIM. But that's advertising for you. And I don't say this in a critical way. From someone who has piled on a stone in the last eighteen months I can probably include myself in that Mrs Blobby critique. But that's coming off folks, which is another story and for a later blog post. Last nights Thai food and free-flowing Sauvignon Blanc didn't exactly help with the diet plan though. Weak, so weak. I must do better.
Now, where's that tube of Jaffa Cakes?
More on my trip to Ragdale later.