Mirrors

I am writing this early because this evening is The Night.

It is the night of my very first online university lecture, and I am both excited and worried about it.

I do not want to ask stupid questions or fail to understand or accidentally turn up in a T shirt which has got tomato sauce streaked all down the front. I am going to have to concentrate very hard to avoid all these potential misadventures.

At the time of writing I am still on the taxi rank, having come out for the afternoon in order to help with our cash-generating endeavours. I am going to stay here until the steamer boats stop running up and down the lake, and then  am going to go home and have a good look in the mirror before I switch the computer on.

I have done some looking in the mirror today already. This is not an activity on which I generally waste very much time, because the results are always unsatisfactory, but today has had another exciting thing in it, being the day on which I went for my birthday-present massage.

This was a present from my parents, back in July when I clocked up yet another trip around the sun. It was a voucher to attend an establishment called Bowness Beauty Salon, and, where I would receive something called a Relax Package.

I had no idea what a Relax Package might be, nor where Bowness Beauty Salon was. I looked the last bit up. It turned out that it is on the main road between Bowness and Windermere, and I drive past it about forty times a day. 

I was booked in for one o’ clock, and originally intended to walk down, but of course when it came to it I was far too late, and had to go in the taxi. This generated some internal anxiety, because there is never anywhere to park in Bowness, but when I got there it turned out that the Parking Space Gods had been looking out for me, because there was a space in the car park right outside the salon which was too small for anybody else to park in. My taxi is no smaller than anybody else’s car, but I have a great deal of automobile-related self- belief, and so I squeezed into it and practically had to climb out of the window to get out.

Just as an extra Parking Space Gods birthday present, the ticket machine was not working, and so I did not need to pay anything for the privilege either.

Happy birthday to me, backdated to last July, obviously.

I have never been in a beauty salon before, and it was suitably white and pretend-clinical, with lots of the sort of cosmetics that stand in solitary moodiness under a single spotlight, and plastic white flowers in fluted jars.

I had not thought to get changed after emptying the dogs and cleaning the fireplace out, and felt mildly grubby.

I might have been rather more than mildly grubby, and avoided the mirrors.

This did not matter, because I was ushered into a little room at the back where I had to undress anyway. I lay down on a towel-smothered couch with a hole in it for my face.

A pretty girl dressed in a middle class sort of overall explained that the Relax Package was for a back and shoulder massage and a facial.

I did not know what a facial was, and had to ask.

She explained that it was a massage and a cleanse and an exfoliate.

I was not much wiser but thought it could just be a surprise.

She asked me what my normal skin cleansing routine was, and I explained about washing my face with a flannel when I have a shower, or more often if I have been going something grubby. She did not say anything about that, so  suppose it must be all right.

The back massage was splendid. I stuck my face in the hole as instructed, and it turned out that the couch heated up whilst she was doing it, so after a little while I got very warm and dozy. Unexpectedly my worries did fade away, and almost drifted sleepily into dreams. Fortunately my shoulders were sore enough to keep me awake, which is a good job, because even with my face stuck in a hole it would have been embarrassing to snore and dribble.

The facial turned out to be twenty minutes of smearing stuff all over my face and then wiping it off, rather pleasantly, with hot flannels. I liked this, and can safely say that if that is being exfoliated, then I have got no foliage left at all, just a slightly tingly sensation around the nose area.

I stopped writing there to rush off for The Big Night. It is over now, and although it is very late, and I need to stop writing, I can hastily but proudly tell you that I have now received some genuine education.

It started off terribly worryingly, when the zoom thing opened late, and I thought I might not be able to start at all, but it did, and I could, and everything was all right. You will be reassured to hear that I had carefully zipped my body warmer up over my T shirt in order to make sure no tomato sauce could be visible, although I have avoided eating any today, on purpose. This is no hardship because I don’t much like tomato sauce.

I do not at all like being able to see myself being educated, and must explore the computer to find out if there is a way I can switch me off. For some reason that I can’t quite grasp, I am showing on the screen as having a bright red face. I rushed off to check this in a mirror when we stopped for coffee, and it was not red at all but perfectly normal coloured, but nevertheless in the computer I look as though I am in a state of acute embarrassment.

I will have to tell you about the education bit tomorrow, because I dashed off back to work after it had finished, and if I do not go to bed now I will be terribly grumpy in the morning. It was jolly all right and I do not think I am going to turn out to be humiliatingly stupid.

Probably.