Rather Good Vibrations - and another blog award!

It is light again long into the evening and I am feeling less like a demented Cinderella frantically trying to get home before darkness. Last weekend I went up to in Kinross in Scotland to catch up with a friend from an old (and very weird) boarding school. She returned from Australia a few years ago with a whole family of her own and now they live in a pretty close in a controlled riot of musical instruments, skate boards, school books and fridge lists. Oh and wine bottles! Anita and I haven’t spent time together since we were 18 and stay up all night drinking cava (as you might tell from my pallid visage) and slotting memories back into each others brains like a game of Connect 4. On the Saturday we groggily float over the grass between lazy pheasants and ghosts on the beautiful and spooky Loch Leven Castle Island. Mary Queen of Scotts was interred here from June 1567 to May 1568, and its the place where she was forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son James 1V on 24 July 1567. …now the castle roof is open to the bluest sky and thousands of midges sparkle in the sunlight.

photos: LochLeven 2009: Tanvir Bush (c)

Back in Cambridge and I have launched into a bizarre relationship with a massage chair that my local gym has installed. Now, as we all know, most women of a certain age have wide ranging appreciation of things that vibrate however this takes the experience to a whole other level.

The chair looks like a very well padded leather high backed lazy boy. One sinks into it and presses a button at which point there is a buzzing and some of odd prodding as, apparently, the chair, using infrared, ‘checks you out’ for any bits of the body in particular need of deep massage. At the press of another button the chair shifts backwards and sort of…scoops you up into its leathery warmth. Your legs and bare feet are squeezed and pinched gently, released, squeezed again.. the motors start motoring, massaging firmly in throbbing circles from the scalp down the back and into the seat, even under and between the thighs…ahh… and then all the way back up again. One is thrust gently upwards and pulled downwards …and …. Err..how can I explain this? It’s highly erotic.

I don’t think it was intended to be. It is designed to be ‘therapeutic’ which is not a word one associates with languid moaning and it definitely does not seem to be having the same effect on the men. They walk past looking rather baffled, in fact slightly nervous. The long line of women however waiting for their 15 minutes with ‘the chair’ are trembling slightly. They disappear behind the screen and then emerge quarter of an hour later hair tousled, glazed expressions on their faces, floating. There are whispered conversations in the changing rooms. Those that know wink and exchange tokens.
I give the chair another couple of weeks before it explodes.

I have been awarded another blog award, the Noblesse Oblige!! Dad da daaa!!!! I am thrilled and proud and very grateful. Thank you Val http://mokeysontheroof.blogspot.com/ who nominated me for this. I am really touched

In my next post I am going to chat more about this award and Val and my writing and nominate some others. Its a lovely award and I hold it close to my heart. As I said to Val, its been hard these last few months and these things make me smile and smile. Thank you so very much and to all of you who read my ridiculous ramblings! Thank you!