Further Under the Duvet Read Free Page B

engaged. Or going out with someone. Then I wanted to buy my son a watch for his twenty-first, and it didn’t seem to be any impediment whatso-
ever
that I don’t have children.
    Eventually I got away with the christening present, a ‘piece’ for my sister for Christmas (it was April) and a birthday present for Himself, five months hence. And then the wrapping began – an intricate and deeply soothing process, like watching delicate, skilled hands produce the finest origami. First they put the item in a little black velvet box, then in a duck-egg-blue suede pouch, then in a matching Tiffany box tied up with a white satin Tiffany ribbon and, finally, in a Tiffany bag. I’ve never seen such beautiful wrapping. I felt so overcome it was a bit like the part in
The Great Gatsby
when Daisy weeps, ‘I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts.’
    Out in the street, it was like waking up from the most pleasant dream. Except that I had all these duck-egg-blue carrier bags and a great dread of receiving my next credit card bill.
    First published in
Cara
magazine, September 2002
.

The Great Outdoors
    Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not an outdoorsy type. If I was offered the choice between white-water rafting and being savaged by a rabid dog, I’d be likely to tick the box marked ‘dog’. The reasons for this? One, I have terrible hair. Four seconds in the rain makes it all bulk and frizz up so that I look like Sideshow Bob. Two, I am very short (five foot one) and haven’t worn flat shoes since 1992. As a result my calf muscles have got so used to being held up by four-inch heels that they’ve shrunk to the point where if I put my heels on the floor, my toes lift up. Three, I am almost life-threateningly lazy. See? Not outdoorsy, not outdoorsy at all. So how come I’m marching along at the crack of dawn, in (almost) flat boots, a mountain looming on one side of me, an atmospherically spooky lake on the other, with hailstones pinging off my face like gravel and – the weirdest bit of all – I’m not even crying?
    A little background is necessary, I think…
    Here’s how it is: I love spas. More than life itself. I’ve become so dependent on them that I’ve completely lost the ability to relax by myself. I also love my husband and I like to keep him about my person at all times, rather like a good-luck charm. But my husband – who happens to be a man – doesn’t like spas, he fears and mistrusts them. So how to reconcile the two?
    Enter stage left, the Delphi spa and mountain adventure centre. I already knew about the adventure centre: a hellish place featuring macho, Snickers-eating, hair-frizzing, kayaky stuff. A place where young men stood around in luminous raingear and urged each other on to fling themselves off cliff-faces. Right? But I knew less about the spa – until it started winning awards. The
Observer
included it in its ‘ten of the world’s best spas’. Mariella Frostrup, doyenne of spas, described it in the
Mail on Sunday
as ‘a world-class spa’. Now, wait a minute – a world-class spa in Ireland? Surely some mistake. We Irish do other things well – the craic, the chat, the charm. But spas? Since when?
    Well, since now. Thrilled that we had found the perfect combination – I could stagger from treatment to treatment, he could look death in the face in a variety of ways – Himself and myself set off for Delphi. It’s in the west of Ireland, in Galway. Or possibly Mayo. I never managed to establish which – both are keen to claim dominion because Delphi’s the kind of property which would add kudos to any county’s portfolio. Either way it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. The further west we drove the more soaring the peaks became, the narrower the roads and the wilder the landscape. Silver streams hurtled down the steep-sided mountains to become noisy, fast-flowing roadside brooks. Purple shale and blue-toned limestone broke the surface of the fields and the only living