Laura Craik on massage dilemmas, Brooklyn's pearly whites and your new party game

Our columnist takes on the latest trends
Laura Craik6 May 2016

The other morning — slightly hungover — I made a sarky comment about the Laundry Fairy. ‘I see the Laundry Fairy didn’t come again last night,’ I told my husband and children, the younger of which, to be fair, is still too small to do anything useful with laundry beyond putting my bras on her head and laughing. ‘Looks like I’ll have to put away this huge mountain of laundry myself.’

‘You sound stressed,’ said the elder child. I confessed that, yes, I did feel a tad stressed and was also suffering from a bit of back pain, thanks to the large cross weighing heavily across my latissimus dorsi as I bent down to fold yet another pile of washing. ‘Maybe you should have a massage,’ said my husband.

A massage! What a brilliant idea! Or it would be, if I didn’t belong to that percentage of the population whose joy at being oiled, stroked and kneaded wasn’t cancelled out by the sound of whale music interspersed with pan pipes and little tinkling bells. Why do they do that? Nobody likes lift Muzak, so why pipe massage Muzak into a room you paid top dollar to feel relaxed in? If music really must be played — for example, to drown out the drilling from the luxury flat conversion next door — can’t the customer bring her own? Imagine being massaged to Prince. Or Beethoven. Or Guns N’ Roses, if that’s what floats your boat.

One of the many lovely things about living in London is the stream of beauty salons and day spas offering variants of massage to suit even the pickiest people. If I’m in a rush, I go to my local Cowshed. If I want a real kneading, I go to Bliss. If I fancy drifting off, I go to Elemis. Which probably sounds as though

I spend my life face down on a gurney murmuring ‘harder, harder’ — yuh, I wish. I go for a massage two to three times a year, and have a bucket list of spas to visit, including the Corinthia, the Bulgari, Ushvani and Grace Belgravia, all of which I’ve heard are fab. None of these are inexpensive. But sometimes, you just have to pay somebody £75 to be nice to you for an hour.

Going dental

Another week, another blinding revelation from the Beckham family. Not quite as life-affirming as the recent news that Cruz can sing, but as status updates go, Brooklyn’s ‘So today I went to the dentist and he said I have really clean and strong teeth,’ still seemed to be greeted with enthusiasm by his 6.7 million followers. The accompanying black and white selfie of Brooklyn in the dentist’s chair (is this a new genre? The Delfie?) garnered 226K likes. It also reminded me to go to the dentist, a woman I haven’t visited for two-and-a-half years. Gross, right? Truly minging and inexcusable. Look after your teeth, people, and they will look after you. And thank you, Brookers, for this useful public service announcement.

What a package

How to stop guests from fannying about on their iPhones during dinner? Simple: play a game of pass the parcel. When Katie Grand hosted a Love supper club at Dover Street Market to mark her friend Edie Campbell’s sew-on sticker and patch range, so lavish were the prizes beneath the layers that no guest dared break concentration to check their Instafeed. No Haribo Starmix packets here: just gifts by Gucci, Miu Miu, Fendi, Bottega Veneta, Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren. Prices start at £1 for a sticker. For more details, follow @itchyscratchypatchy on Instagram. But only once the party games are finished.

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