- Image by Echo Valley Ranch via Flickr
Had a fantastic massage today. If you’ve never had a Thai massage before then you won’t know that it’s like a normal massage, but with a bit of body bending and stomping up and down on your back thrown in. Thrown being the operative word. It’s certainly great for getting the lymph moving around the system, and all the toxins where they should be – on the outside.
As I’m lying there trying to think about something else apart from the pain, my mind started wandering back to our very first visit. Each month Mark and I travel to London to host an Online Marketing Group of internet marketers and business builders who meet in the secret back rooms of Foyles Bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. Fantastic Cafe by the way.
Just up the road is the start of Oxford Street and its sprinkling of bauble shops selling puce faux leather handbags, fish net stockings, purple sparkly shoes with 10 inch stiletto heals, and mirrors you can’t actually see yourself in because most of the glass is taken up with a picture of Elvis riding in a Double Decker bus. (Nice dark wood frame though). Three floors up and above one of these glistening Emporia of Tack is the Thai Massage Parlour. Plaster hangs off the walls of the reception and the toilet has the washing machine and tumble drier stuffed in the cubicle alongside the WC. No ventilation adds to the mouldy atmosphere, as do the damp towels. The massage girls hanging around in reception all looked about 10 years old and each one could comfortably fit, whole, into just the one leg of my jeans.
We were the only customers.
A wall poster advertised ‘two girls for just £70 for the hour’. Bargain. And our first thoughts? Knocking shop. I had visions of everyone in reception giggling as we were led off into separate rooms for our ‘massage’. You can be sure that if that did happen, then I wouldn’t be sharing; so that brings me to the two points of this story, and here they are…
1. I was expecting to see underworld seedy and so that’s what I saw.
2. I should have turned on my heal, grabbed Mark by the arm, and made a swift exit before the bloke behind the reception, who was very clearly the pimp, decided to do something nasty to silence us before we could spread the word to the relevant brothel elimination squad.
The ‘girl’ who massaged my neck was called Pai. She was 43 and lived in Catford with her husband and two teenage children. She had started her training with the Monks in Thailand at aged 7. She quickly spotted the chronic shoulder problem I’d been suffering with for over a year, and was still taking knock out drops for; and then she sorted it out.
Pai made more progress in that short session than the combined forces of the NHS, private consultants and the National Osteopathy Centre had managed in over a year, and for a lot less cash, time, pain and frustration. As we were leaving an hour or so later, the parlour was filling up with the Massage Therapists and Physio’s turning out from nearby London gyms, fitness studios, osteopaths and clinics and who visit at the end of their working day to get their own cricks and pains sorted out ready for the next day.
So WISIWYG does work. What you see IS what you get – IF you don’t look beyond your expectations. I saw a brothel and that is how it would have been forever crystallised in my memory had I not decided to risk all by giving it a go.
Here’s to peeking out from behind the settee…
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