Shock news for Britain's booming spa culture! Condé Nast Traveller has just published its Gold List 2008 and only one UK spa made the top 10 best in the world, scraping in at number nine. The rest are all, unsurprisingly, in places such as Mexico, Malaysia and the Maldives.
I'm delighted. This will be a message to our hospitality industry that the spa madness must stop. Every hotel seems to want or need one these days. All across our chilly little island, ancient barns are being gutted and filled with aromatherapy suites, Turkish baths, massage beds, seaweed vats, colonic pipes and waxing pots.
This is not what a British holiday is all about. The two-week version should involve damp funfairs, cream teas and icy bathing. The three-day version should involve long walks, volumes of Trollope and loose-leaf tea by the fire. No version should involve tramping across a drizzly courtyard in a thin (albeit monogrammed) bathrobe, while the north wind freezes the last remnants of 'rejuvenating mud' to your miserable ankles.
A British holiday should smell of salt and vinegar, grass and bonfires. It should not smell of burning hair, patchouli oil and yoghurt. It should sound like calling woodpigeons and the trickle of cream sherry into a beaker, not whale song and the thump of Norwegian fist on thigh.
We should be excited when the sun comes up over the hillside, not when we discover from a laminated slip on the bathroom door that we're allowed to keep our disposable slippers. We should find copies of the Field or Horse & Hound in reception, not Top Santé with the horoscope page torn out.
Male holidaymakers should have straw hats, voluminous shorts or tweedy hacking jackets, not Donald Trump coiffures and silk dressing gowns gaping open to reveal well-fed European paunches. Women should have floral dresses stretched over plump, happy backsides - not wet nails, new tits and noses like pencil sharpeners.
In Scotland, we want golf, hard beds and top marmalade, not sugar-free jam, Wag weddings and 50 tiny, Kelly Hoppen scatter cushions that need airlifting off the bed before sleep. In Wales, we want beamy cottages, windswept castles, saltmarsh lamb and lots of cheese, not sticks of celery in a steam room.
But you want to know which one it is, don't you? The UK spa that made the top 10 best? Fine, I'll tell you: it's Calcot Manor in Gloucestershire. Have a good time. Enjoy an 'energising Guinot facial', a 'volcanic hot stones massage', an algae wrap and a dry flotation.
There's so much stuff to be done! So much beautifying! I don't know if you ever read glossy magazines, but the amount of advice they give about how various bits of the face and body should be tweaked, prinked, plucked and generally maintained is overwhelming. It's as if we are all antique cars, needing constant pricey visits to the garage to keep us roadworthy. I have a selection of February women's magazines in front of me. Between them, they recommend, inter alia: threading, microdermabrasion, eyelash extensions, 'lunchtime facelift', an oxygen detox, a hair shine detox, a red-light skin peel, green tea facials, multihanded body brushing, laser hair removal, a 'universal contour wrap', Hammam Rasul (whatever the hell that is) and a full-on fortnight's stay at a Swiss beauty resort.
No wonder some people have to plan holidays that are exclusively treatment-based. A 'Swiss beauty resort' is not even a hotel with a spa, it's just a spa with duvets. No fun, just back-to-back physical tinkering. Can you imagine that? All the hassle of travelling, the trauma of flying, the difficulty of getting two weeks off work ... only to be pummelled and peeled nonstop until it's time to go home again.
All of which is not touching on the question of cost. There surely can't be enough Russian millionaires in this country to fill all the new spas, which means that normal people must be going skint on grooming.
And that's before the hot new trend arrives from Japan (as a newspaper assured us last week that it will) for the 24-carat gold facemask.
I have no idea whether anyone actually looks better for this amount of professional attention and I don't believe enjoyment is guaranteed either. I generally find massages ticklish, facials itchy, body wraps claustrophobic and that whole universe just slightly boring. I lie there being poked and prodded, one eye on the clock like in a physics lesson.
Doesn't it all feel a bit like hard work? When I'm on holiday, I want a bloody holiday! Who ruled that every hotel in the universe suddenly had to shove leaflets under the bedroom doors, threatening customers with ayurveda and thalassotherapy?
I suspect it's all to do with the iPod generation and people's terrifying inability to do nothing. We have forgotten how to enjoy a fortnight with only a bucket and spade. Why have a stretch of deserted Cornish beach outside your hotel when you could have a multiplex cinema, a bowling alley and an internet cafe? Why take a simple siesta when you could 'rest' on a massage bed while a giant Swede marinades you in a fat-busting caffeine slop?
We're bored! What's next? What now? Are we there yet?
Perhaps the hundreds (or thousands) of British hotels whose spas did not get a look in to the Gold 2008 list will now give up, close them down and turn them back into barns. And we will remember, once again, what we're supposed to do on holiday: sleep. Read. Think. And come back looking much the same, but happier.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
