On our last afternoon in Austria, my wife and I headed
to the sauna for a bit of après ski relaxation. I am never quite sure what I am
meant to be getting out of this experience. You get hot and sweaty and it’s
hard to breath, which I imagine is what it’s like to be buried alive. My guess
is that for some people it’s a bit like having a spicy curry, more about the
bravado of what you can take, rather than any actual pleasure.
I was wearing my trunks, waiting for my wife in the
central-heated coffin when a woman in her fifties entered. I noticed with some
alarm that she had removed her swimming
costume and was bare-ass naked. Which was rather bold. She greeted me with a
cheery hello as if nudity was the most natural thing in the world and then lay
down opposite me, with her bottom bits smiling up at me like an end-to-end
double rainbow. I didn’t know where not to look. I would have gone red and had
steam coming out of my ears, if I wasn’t in a sauna and already experiencing
these cartoon symptoms.
My wife came in. How would I explain this suspicious
situation?
She handled the expanse of flesh with more maturity
than I could muster, accepting this as something European and sophisticated.
But there’s nothing sophisticated about not sniggering like a schoolboy when
presented with an unexpected noo-noo. You
could see her chuff…. I imagine.
I know I am 48 and should be able to take a stranger’s
tuppence in my stride (so to speak), but I am repressed and uncomfortable
enough with my own nudity so I made my excuses and left.
Yet had I known that this hotel had tiny, hot wooden
room where I could sit all day and have European women parading their bottoms
before me, I might have pretended I’d twisted my ankle on day one and left my
wife on the slopes.
Then I noticed a sign on the wall saying that it was
policy for everyone to be naked in the sauna. After all my judgment of this
over-confident lady, it was I that had committed the social faux pas, by
keeping my own raddled genitalia hidden.
I couldn’t understand the logic of nudity being a
requirement. Sure if you want to be free and let it all flop out, then go
ahead, but why was it compulsory? What’s the problem with a man wanting to hide
his pathetic shriveled worm from the view of an uninterested stranger? A
hypothetical man, obviously.
It also said that under-14s weren’t allowed to go in
the sauna, which meant that over 14 year olds were allowed! Europe disgusts me.
And if I found this experience so scarring at nearly 50, imagine how the
teenage me would have reacted to seeing his first bare lady outside the pages
of a sodden and torn Fiesta magazine that he had found in Shipham Wood. He
would have exploded.
I was pro-Europe until this happened, but I think now
that the UK should have an immediate Brexit and try and row these islands as
far away from this hot bed of liberation and contentment as possible.
And for those of you who suddenly have the urge for a
sauna, I was staying at the beautiful and highly recommended Hotel Goldenberg
in Lech.
Though now this news is out, I imagine the spa will be
full of pasty British men with their shriveled chicken-neck winkies sweating
sadly in the heat. At least I will feel at home.
The real victim of the phrase “Netflix and chill” entering common parlance is Craig David. Thanks to the new connation of “chilling”, he now has to make love with the girl he met on Monday for five days straight. Craig’s not getting any younger and he could do with a break before meeting the next girl on Monday. When’s he going to get time to write a song to tell all his mates what he’s done?
