I love the smell of jasmine in the evening

I had a bout of the post-Glastonbury blues last week I think. Maybe, after months of relative TLC, my body was overwhelmed by the daily injections of black coffee, hot cider and fried bread. Maybe I caught a bug from not washing my hands enough. Maybe my soul was daunted at the thought of returning to urban office life. Whatever. I wasn't feeling good.

So on Friday night I went for an Ayurvedic massage at Eau de Vie. I had actually booked a deep tissue massage, but the deep tissue woman was off sick (maybe she had the post-Glastonbury blues as well). So instead a tiny woman with bottles of oil nearly as big as she was took me upstairs and did strange things to me.

And it was fantastic. I want to do it all the time. I was a bit sceptical at the beginning as what I wanted was a good pounding and instead it was all very gentle. I was also a bit worried that I was becoming aroused (not supposed to happen, surely?) but then realised she had just dragged me up the bed by my neck and my nipples had got squashed in on themselves.

And then I stopped thinking about anything at all, and it's not often I can do that. It was quite difficult to get up afterwards and Cowley Road seemed even more insane than usual, but I managed to negotiate buying some tofu and rice from the Rice Box then floated home for an early night. I felt amazing.

So I am thinking to myself, in the style of a good search engine, we need more results like this. This is about refreshing the parts that lager cannot reach.

I found a little one last night. We had a houseful for dinner and I wasn't at my most sociable, so I retreated for a bath after a terrifying episode of Spooks. Baths are definitely good, especially ours, which is huge, but the bathroom is an oppressive reminder of some of the drawbacks of living with others: we can't agree what to do with it, so it retains the smelly brown carpet it's had since we moved in.

So I still wasn't quite right. But then I wrapped myself in my vast pink bath towel, a glorious feeling in itself, and went and sat in the garden for half an hour. There are so few evenings in Britain when it's warm enough to sit outside at 11 at night in a bath towel and smell the jasmine as your hair dries. Taking advantage of one of them was a very good move.

joella