steam room

Nuts, spa pool tsunamis, royal visits and budget shopping – the latest gossip from the steam room

On the alert for another water-based coccyx-cracking drama. Pic credit: JulesInKY, www.morguefile.com

The hot topic in the steam room tonight was Nuts: the Nutritional Benefits Thereof. The latest newsletter from the health club management was apparently full of top tips about how to get enough nuts in your diet. Allegedly – I haven’t seen it – the management say nuts are the new garlic-and-tomatoes. It sounded a pretty outlandish claim to me – I mean, how is a handful of brazils and walnuts going to help anyone make a nice spaghetti Bolognese? How would home-made tomato soup turn out if based around a mix of almonds and hazelnuts? Barely adequately, one would have thought.

Anyhow, the topic of nuts held no-one’s interest for long and conversation moved onto speculation about what would be the upshot if a certain club member, who’s built more for endurance than speed, were to take a running jump into the spa pool, while The Boys were in it. Apparently he had recently tried this feat in the swimming pool, with unfortunate results. Not realising the pool is only three feet deep at its deepest, he incurred a nasty crack to the coccyx.

I hardly need mention the opportunities exploited for crack- and coccyx-based jokes, but “a trip to A&E all round,” seemed to be the consensus on what the resulting tsunami would produce if their absent chum were allowed to carry out his daring leap while the spa pool was occupied.

Next on the agenda was last week’s visit by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to the town, to open the newly-refurbished college. Nick said the royals had been greeted by a load of students dressed and made up as aliens. The college does courses in make-up and tv/film production, among other things, so I daresay their choice of dress was something to do with their studies, but Tim said no, they weren’t students, they must have been just the people of the town, come to have a gawp at the Queen. Bill asked if they were wearing Crocs with white socks and grubby tracksuit bottoms; if so, they were definitely the townsfolk, on their way to an afternoon at the Wetherspoons.

Rory then did a rather good impersonation of Prince Philip asking if they could pop into the local Iceland for a spot of shopping when they’d finished opening the college; and the Queen replying that there was no need, the freezer at the Palace was full.

This reminded Bill of a rather coarse joke involving someone bending over the frozen chicken freezer at Iceland. He withheld the rude words though, out of consideration for the “ladies” present, so I thought it only respectful not to repeat the one I’d heard about the obscene phone call and the television-watching husband. If anyone wants to hear it I can repeat it privately, but it does have a very rude word in it – and anyway, I’ve already revealed the punchline, so best not to bother.

Anyway, when conversation turns to Iceland – as it does frighteningly frequently, Rory claiming to be an avid fan of frozen party snacks – I always know we’re in dangerous territory because it means we’re about to start a tedious conversation about Shopping. Never believe anyone who tells you that it’s women who like talking about shopping. Most women I know find the process pretty tedious. But the Boys in the Steam Room love it – and the more budget the better. That lot could form a Lidl and Aldi appreciation society.

Insults fly as “Tarquin” is accused of being too posh and I receive jibes about being overweight

The Boys were on top form last night in the steam room. I hadn’t been for a while, what with one thing and another, and in my absence they seemed to have imbibed a dose of some substance that makes you think you can sing or are funny.

There was a debate about favourite karaoke songs, with Maggie saying hers was These Boots are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra. Someone asked how that went, so she sang the chorus, helped by Richard, who stood up and did the moves, following up with a rendition of the bass line to Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower. It’s quite rare to hear music in the steam room – idle banter yes; half-witted laughter, yes; voices raised in heated political debate, yes; but live music, no. It was quite hot in the steam but everyone was reluctant to leave for fear of missing any of this unprecedented piece of performance art.

We wondered what would be the favourite karaoke song of one of the absent Boys, whom I shall call Tarquin. He’s generally agreed to be the poshest member at the club, which is saying something – we’re in leafy Surrey, after all, and four-wheel-drive vehicles aren’t in short supply in the car park. Rory said Tarquin was too posh to sing karaoke – after all, he’s been known to wear his ermine and coronet to the health club, before changing into his swimming trunks. Nick said he didn’t know about that, but that Tarquin did have Royal connections, namely a Prince Albert. This led to a rather coarse conversation about whether the Prince Albert was too loose and needed tightening, or whether it was actually a bit tight and Tarquin struggled to push it on of a morning.

Like his namesake, Rory Bremner, Rory is rather good at doing impersonations and made us laugh by doing impressions of two of the absent members getting into the spa pool. Even though he didn’t say a word – just imitated their posture, facial expressions and methods of noisily displacing water – we were able to guess straight away who he was impersonating.

Someone speculated as to what people might say about Rory and Nick when they are not there, to which Rory cogently replied: “That’s why we’re always here, so they don’t get a chance to talk about us”.

I wonder what they say about me behind my back. It’s been quite a good week for insults. I bumped into a former neighbour when I was out for a jog the other day – she was walking her dog. Passing the time of day I said I’d taken up jogging to try and lose a bit of weight and she looked me up and down and said: “Mm yes, you have put some weight on, haven’t you? Must be all that food you eat.” Based on the fact that she once saw me making a chicken casserole!

This came only days after my musical guru, the Modern Folk Poet, revealed he’d written a comic song about overweight women, inspired by me. He then made matters worse by bringing the subject up every five minutes.

“I haven’t offended you, have I, by suggesting you’re fat? It’s only a joke.”

“I mean, I didn’t mean to offend you, by implying you’re overweight.”

“I thought you’d see the funny side, being as you’re a bit porky at the moment.”

“It’s not that I think you’re really fat – maybe carrying just a few too many pounds. Bit of exercise, soon shed that bit of flab.”

“Women can look quite nice if they’re a bit curvy; who wants a skinny woman?”

He ran out of steam in the end, before I had to resort to a vicious kick and a “Shut the fuck up.” Anyway, I remembered that I am in a position to get my own back. I have a half-written comic song of my own which I can polish up and wheel out. Set to the tune of What a Wonderful World, by Louis Armstrong, it’s a moderately offensive parody about men with beards, one of which objects the Modern Folk Poet possesses. As soon as I can learn to play C sharp major on the guitar, which the somewhat complex chord structure demands, I’ll be in a position to get my own back.

Pic credit: Michelle Meiklejohn, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=901

Cocaine smuggling and other scatological topics

Conversation in the steam room got a bit scatological at the weekend, so don’t read this if you’re about to have your breakfast.

One of the Boys, who’s a customs official at the airport, was telling us about the increasing number of “swallowers” they’re seeing arriving off international flights. Swallowers, apparently, are those optimistic travellers who board a flight with their stomach full of packets of cocaine. The idea is that, in due course, the packages work their way through the digestive system and emerge at the other end ready to be extracted from the lavatory and sold on.

Airport Man said that suspected swallowers are detained until such time as the packages might reasonably be expected to travel south. Sometimes the packages leak, causing the suspect to exhibit bizarre behaviour and astonishing strength, needing four or more customs officials to hold them down. Other times the packages burst, causing the suspect to drop dead.

More often than not, the cocaine turns up as expected in the toilet pan, causing the suspect to spend long periods of time in a British prison.

Airport Man said some smugglers “hold onto” their stomach contents for days, even weeks, until nature finally forces its way through. Apparently a customs officer has to stay with them until this happens, which must get a bit tedious for both parties. I can’t imagine that someone who’s been used to a regular post-breakfast poo would feel much like witty banter or intellectual conversation after a week of straining to keep it in while being closely watched by a bored foreign bloke in a uniform.

Some smugglers are driven to it out of desperation – one young man was trying to raise money to pay for his mother’s cancer treatment in Africa – others out of coercion, like the young woman who arrived at Gatwick with black eyes and a broken nose but no cocaine, having refused at the last minute to act as a mule.

Airport Man told the tale of one man who got the mother of all sore throats after swallowing 96 packets and refused to continue, at which the drug baron insisted he bend over, and inserted the rest of the 100-strong consignment where the sun doesn’t shine.

And one swallower got safely through customs in London after a flight from Portugal and ejected the packets, only for the compatriots she met at the airport to retrieve them from the toilet and swallow them, unwashed, in preparation for their onward flight to Africa.

Other poor sods have apparently been told that, having had the correct magic ritual performed pre-flight, they will be invisible to the customs officers, only to find that’s not quite true.

Sometimes the detainees are apparently respectable, middle class businessmen who give no outward appearance of being crims, whose baggage carries no incriminating traces and who would normally be let through – the only reason to hold them being the utter conviction of the police in the country of departure that they are guilty as hell, a conviction that often proves correct, once their digestive juices lead to the inevitable conclusion.

All this led to a discussion about whether drugs should be legalised. Most felt this would be a good idea as it would take the drugs trade out of the hands of gangsters and put it in the hands of the state. While agreeing with this in principle, I’m slightly averse to the idea of putting any more profit-making opportunities in the hands of the greedy corporations that presumably would end up running the newly-liberated cocaine retailing industry. The very idea of banning certain drugs would then be unthinkable, since the corporations would simply not allow it. We could then no more ban heroin than we could ban alcohol now – the commercial interests involved would outweigh any public interest.

Rory arrived at this point in the discussion and lowered the tone by talking about his new haircut, an all-over Number One crew-cut, which had left him looking like that dense blond pilot bloke out of Top Gun. Why pay good money for a haircut, he argued, when you can do it yourself with a £12 gadget that, admittedly, did look like it was intended for chopping onions and might perhaps take your ear off.

This led the boys on to discussing other methods of hair removal. Julian said he’d once had his chest waxed for charity and it had stung something shocking. The others weren’t aware that hair grew back after waxing, so I showed them my legs, looking fairly hairy three weeks post-wax. The subject of “back, sack and crack” came up then. Rory said he’d not consider the “sack”, and would far rather deal with that bit with a pair of nail scissors. Julian said he’d never have the “crack”, for fear it would “play havoc with me piles”.

I left them in the spa pool debating the possibility of hormone replacement to address middle-aged libido loss.

Pic credit: Ambro, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1499

Polite greeting overcomes my cynicism about offensive signage

Conversation in the steam room tonight threatened for a while to be almost intelligent, with an interesting discussion about website development, but it descended into its usual levels of inanity when I mentioned I’d been to Climping at the weekend and someone asked if climping was legal, especially in a public place. They all know perfectly well that Climping is a place in Sussex.

Someone then put some aromatic oil on the heater and no-one could decide whether it was eucalyptus or whether it had more fruity, or even floral, overtones – perhaps with a touch of rosemary? They sounded like a bunch of beauty therapists in the fragrance section of a department store.

Rory pretended to read the label and announced that if taken internally it would give the user dark stools; he then left, allegedly to take a stool sample, at which Bill said he should spread his sample over the walls; it wouldn’t make any difference as they were so dirty anyway.

A discussion about the riots, begun on Friday night, re-emerged, this time about the theory that at least some of the burnt-out shops were inside jobs, carried out opportunistically by owners to claim on the insurance or by property developers to make listed sites easily available for redevelopment.

There was some idly childish speculation about whether one of the regular crowd, absent tonight, who had allegedly been seen working out in the gym in tight shorts, was on Viagra. There followed an astonishingly dull debate about the relative merits of the 435 and 405 buses from the town centre, enlivened by Rory objecting to the implications about his seniority of Tim’s suggestion that he (Rory) could use his bus pass on either of these thrilling omnibus options.

I had to leave at this point as I wanted my tea and there seemed no likelihood of the conversation getting more high-brow. But to return briefly to Climping – legal or not – having written previously about the plethora of terse signage telling people what to do and not do in Bristol, I was struck by how polite the signs in Sussex were.

“Please enjoy your visit” urged the sign at the entrance to the beach. Another sign told us this was a “dog-friendly car park” (presumably it likes to pat the dumb chums on the head and give them a biscuit).

Even a sign ordering dog owners to keep their pets on a lead was prefaced with “Polite Notice”; while the sign on the way out of the car park wished us “Safe journey home!”.

A refreshingly different tone from the Bristol signs, the thrust of whose message was “look, stop doing whatever it is you’re doing; now bugger off home”.

Shower dream scandal overshadows WordPress excitement

Much joy and self-congratulation as I completed the transfer of my old website to its new home at WordPress. This might not sound like a huge achievement – a 12-year-old could set up a WordPress site and many probably do – but there was an element of back-room techi-ness involved in cancelling one provider, inputting the codes to transfer the domain name elsewhere and then setting up a Google app to make sure my original email address would still work.

I was well chuffed when I’d done it, partly because I’m quite slow-witted when it comes to anything technical, but also because WordPress is so much better looking, easier and quicker to update and has more functionality than my old site. And it’s far, far, cheaper.

Anyway, I was so excited when it was all up and running properly that I headed up to the health club to find someone to tell. It’s pretty misty in the steam room so I couldn’t say for certain that the boys’ eyes glazed over as I chuntered on about MX codes and DNS updates and name server changes – but I suspect they did.

In any event, “oh” was about the extent of their reaction. I began to realise how IT people and scientists must feel when after months of work they make some enormously exciting break-through, only for everyone else to find the news rather dull.

For some reason the steam room boys seemed far more interested in hearing about Rory’s confession that he’d had a dream about Toby having a shower. He (Rory) had woken up feeling all hot and tense. “Haha, do you mean you were feeling tense, or making tents?” punned Nick, lewdly.

Certainly, an obvious question needed to be addressed: did this dream mean Rory was turning gay? One chap said no, dreams didn’t mean anything, they were just random thoughts. Another of the boys said he’d read somewhere that all erotic dreams, even those about members of the opposite sex, meant gayness was setting in.

It wasn’t an erotic dream, Rory hastened to add – it was just that Toby happened to be in the shower at the time. Naked doesn’t necessarily equal sexy, went Rory’s theory, so dreaming about another man in the shower wasn’t of itself a sign of gayness; though dreaming in the shower about another man probably was.

The distinction seemed moot; the essential fact, the thing one couldn’t overlook, was that one semi-naked man had been dreaming about another, so this remark was received with some scepticism. I reluctantly left the boys to thrash out the issue of  Rory’s sexuality as I wanted to get home and play on WordPress.

Pic credit: Africa

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1803

Toast and what to put on it – the truth about what men talk about

What started out as only an averagely tedious conversation about toast, prompted by Rory admitting he’d achieved nothing all day – apart from painting a bit of the ceiling and watching it dry – other than get up and eat breakfast, plumbed new depths of banality after about 20 minutes when more of the boys arrived in the steam room.

Rory, Nick and I had already pretty much exhausted the possibilities of a conversation involving the relative merits of Marmite, peanut butter and mozzarella cheese as toast toppings, and there seemed a chance of the topic dying a natural death. Then Tim and Nigel arrived and gave the subject fresh impetus by proposing, respectively, porridge and teacakes as viable breakfast alternatives. We debated this for a while but like any controversial subject there was never going to be consensus and we had to agree to differ.

Then we got onto more radical issues with Honey As A Toast Topping: is Manuka Better Or Is It All a Bit of a Con. Tim, our resident bee-keeping expert, said this was a moot point among apiarists but in any event you should opt for a locally-grown honey rather than the sugar-laden muck they import from China.

There was one other female present for a while, when the discussion in the spa pool veered off onto the difference between cous cous, semolina and polenta, but she left after a while, perhaps for fear of falling asleep in the water. I still don’t know the difference – Rory and Nick said it didn’t matter ‘cause they wouldn’t eat it anyway as you can’t get it in Iceland and it sounded too much like hard work in the kitchen when you can just bung a ready meal in the microwave.

The departure of Semolina Lady left me alone with the boys, who steered the subject back to Toast – The Perils of Burning Thereof and the little-known fact that Americans brown only one side of their bread (Is this true? Ed.)

Nigel confided to me that he’d once been in the sauna with a female who said she couldn’t believe the conversation attained such peaks of banality. She’d been under the impression that, given the chance, men like to talk about football and cars. Hearing our lot must have been quite an education for her, bless ‘em.

Binge-drinking, curried goat and see-through trunks

The big issues of the day up the health club the past couple of nights have been Fancy Cakes, Binge Drinking, Crap Customer Service, The Difficulties of Obtaining Goat (as a cookery ingredient) in Surrey, The Dangers of Buying Used Cars, and The Importance of Buying New Swimming Trunks Before They Go All See-Through and People Can See Your Bum.

Why can’t the health club bar sell those nice flaky creamy French patisserie-style pastries, they were complaining in the steam room.  I’d been reliably informed that the club’s own hotel employs a pastry chef, which got us to wondering why the only cake options are those nasty mass-produced muffins wrapped in plastic like those you get in train buffet cars.

Over in the sauna, the talk was of irresponsible consumption of alcohol. People of the Finnish persuasion, one chap who’d been there informed us, chuck vodka down their necks for breakfast and then run outside and fling themselves into the snow, idiots. Rugby players were worse, he said – explaining how as a lad he’d been made to suck a piece of lime, sniff a pinch of salt and then pour a shot glass of tequila into his own eye, in a practice apparently known as “extreme tequila”.

Meanwhile, another of the boys was complaining about being unable to get decent customer service anywhere. He was particularly irked at having been jocularly called “buddy” by the club receptionist. He was not the receptionist’s buddy, and even if he had been, the British “mate” would have been far less offensively familiar than the American version.

Goat came up in the spa pool during a discussion on what we were all having for our tea. I told how I’d made a lovely goat curry the other night and they all wanted to know where I got it – was such an exotic ingredient available in these parts? I lavished praise on the local Asian shop in Redhill, where such things can be got, and we moved on to Rory’s new used car (broke down before he’d gone 50 miles) and Lee’s new trunks (a wise move since the old ones were getting a bit threadbare, apparently).

If you sat in the steam room long enough, you’d amass a huge fund of knowledge on all kinds of trivia – you might get a bit wrinkly though, and sooner or later you’d all run out of things to talk about and they’d start talking about you.

Cucumbers and beards – more intellectual debate from the steam room

Hadn’t been up the health club for a while, what with the fabulous gardening weather and the car packing up, so it was refreshing to find today that the standard of steam room conversation was as diverse and intellectual as ever.

The debate segued seamlessly from Cucumber (the reported health risks thereof) to Horse-racing (the dangers of gambling thereon) to Beards (the cultivation and maintenance thereof), touching en route on Late Payment of Small Business Debts, the latter from a bitter salesman who’d had to drive to and from Scotland in one day to put a rocket up a client who seemed reluctant to cough up for products received.

By far the most fascinating topic was Beards, instigated by the newly-fungused face of one of our little group who had grown one of those doughnut beards seemingly overnight. I thought it quite suited him but I wondered if Rory’s face (I call him Rory cos he has a passing resemblance in a poor light to the tv personality Rory Bremner) would have caused unkind comment among the other boys in the steam room – known as they are for their witty repartee – but he assured me no-one had said a word – apart from “what on earth’s going on, on your face?” and “who’s that in the corner, behind the ferret?”.

Toby, he of the feckless Scottish client, did remark with a shudder that after his epic drive to and from Scotland he had some stubble which he’d rushed to remove, since beards didn’t suit him, but he claimed not have even noticed Rory Bremner’s new facial accessory, other than to say “I thought he looked a bit unshaven”.

Almost-human intelligence in the steam room

There’s not much of an intellectual or cultural ‘scene’ in the town I live in. Indeed, some might argue that ‘culture’ and ‘Redhill’ were a contradiction in terms.

But a lively debate on the issues of the day can often be found in the steam room at my health club, where a little crowd of fellow self-employed odds and sods accumulates around 5pm, seeking out someone to talk to after a day of solitude, ‘water cooler conversation’, as it were.

This gathering of the great minds of the town has become known as the Cheeky Boys’ (most of them are male) After-Work Steam and Sauna Club. While some of their conversations reach a level of almost-human intelligence, others are frankly rather bizarre, so I’ve been keeping notes of the subjects discussed, just to illustrate the sheer breadth of the subject matter that occupies what passes for their minds.

Topics of Steam and Sauna – or TOSS, for short – of the past month have included: bee-keeping, lawn-mower maintenance, capitalism, mothballs, non-iron shirts, volcanoes, insolvency, knees, homosexual dogs and how to cook mutton.

Additionally there is usually speculation about someone or other’s love life, with some outrageous remark being dropped into the conversation to see how long it takes to become accepted fact. This happened only the other day, when one chap glanced at the clock, saw it was 6pm and hurriedly dashed off, muttering that he had to “go to Haslemere”. A discussion followed about why anyone would want to go to Haslemere, especially on a Friday night, which led, via a meandering logic, to the decision that he must have been off to a swingers’ party.

Another day, one chap remarked that he had been for a ‘hand massage’: after he’d left, it quickly passed into historic steam room fact that he’d enjoyed a ‘hand job’.

And it’s widely accepted now that another member washes his dirty drawers in the shower at the club and dries them in the sauna, to save wasting money on using the washer/dryer at home.

One day a hotel guest, an Australian, was in the spa pool on his first visit to the club. He listened for a while to the conversation – it was about what size stick you would need if you got into a fight with a gerbil, or something – then enquired whether we’d all spent too long in the water. “Why d’you say that?” we asked. “Cos it sounds like you’ve been inhaling too many chemicals!” he said.

Fair point. The Cheeky Boys’ conversation might not always be intellectual, but it never fails to amuse.