Now, you may remember Jeff's birthday present to me last year. Yes, the speed dating. The speed dating. Jesus.

This year, he, Devon and Neil clubbed together to get me a present. This time, it was, and I quote verbatim from the gift voucher, a "seaweed mud wrap and full body massage".

Okay, I spend too much time buying clothes, but for the love of God, a seaweed mud wrap? I didn't even know what that meant. Anyway, I couldn't make it to the time booked on the voucher, so in the interests of not appearing to be an ungrateful bastard, I called the place and changed it to Saturday morning.

And then went out on Friday night to get unintentionally plastered. Come Saturday morning, I felt a little ropey, but dragged myself out of bed and along to the mud wrap emporium or whatever one calls such places. I looked for the reception desk when I arrived, and did a mental double take: for a split second, I thought that the woman behind the desk was actually a man in drag.

I was...unsettled.

Turned out she wasn't a man, but was still the one who was going to be doing my mud wrap and massage. Great. The magic happened in a small, dim room in the bowels of the place whose temperature would have been, to a non-hungover person, on the warm side of pleasant. To me, it was like a furnace. I mainly lay still, surfing an internal wave of nausea and trying to enjoy having the skin tone of my back improved by being smeared with mud and wrapped in clingfilm for 15 minutes, and then having a massage that lasted for a full hour.

It was, to be fair, actually quite nice. I only wish I hadn't been quite so under the weather, as evidenced by a hasty walk home to drive the porcelain bus.