As a preamble to the following, I will grant you, dear reader, that it has almost certainly been approaching 20 years, if not more, since I went out on an excursion that one might describe as "clubbing". Since that time, I've been to pubs and bars, some of which played music too loud to be conducive to meaningful conversation with one's peers, but I have not had what, in the early 2000s, we might have referred to as "a large one" for a very long time.
That said, I do still remember the experience quite well. Right back to my teenage years, in fact, when we used to sneak into our nearest nightclub, Enigma, when we were underage. This was always a bit of a mission for me in particular, since I lived seven miles away from most of my friends, and Enigma itself was another 12 miles or so away from them. These excursions took planning, and as such, we tended to want to try and make the most of them.
Likewise, at university, we often had nights out at what one might describe as a "club", but they were mostly pokey little hole-in-the-wall places, usually built around one specific theme. The one (and as far as I'm aware, only) "big club" in Southampton was, at the time of our university attendance, known as Ikon and Diva, and it was subsequently rebranded as Oceana before being bulldozed off the face of the planet a few years back. It was, like Enigma, a bit of an Event any time we decided to go there, because it involved getting right into the city centre, while most of us lived a little further out — near the university, oddly enough.
Enigma, Ikon and Diva were all kind of shit, as I recall, but like I say, we used to like to make the most of our time there. I was often too wasted to really remember much of the specifics of what happened at these places (and the tactical approach was usually to get wasted before entering the club so you didn't have to pay its exorbitant bar prices, but not so wasted that the bouncers wouldn't let you in) but I do have vague memories of them being large complexes where people would hang out, drink and dance, and there would be multiple themed rooms. Ikon and Diva was called as such because of its two main rooms: Ikon played popular, modern dance music (typically house and trance, as I recall) while Diva was "the cheese room" where they'd play everything from '70s hits to S Club 7.
The reason I say all this is because our time at the Longleat Forest Aqua Sana spa this evening was almost the exact opposite of the clubbing experience. It's a place you spend an exorbitant amount of money to get into, just like a nightclub, and once you're in there you are free to mill around and move between various different themed rooms. But the aim at Aqua Sana, in contrast to, say, Ikon and Diva, is to get thoroughly relaxed rather than paralytically drunk and, ideally, into the pants of someone you saw for the first time that evening and thought "they're a bit of all right".
This idle thought occurred to me while I was relaxing in the "Forest Cave" room at Aqua Sana. Lying back in the heated, contoured lounger, surrounded by artificial but convincing cave walls, gazing up at the skylight and watching the sun set, I felt thoroughly at peace with the world — something that I don't think I can say with any great confidence that I ever felt while going out clubbing. In fact, as I recall, more often than not I'd get so drunk I'd get a bit maudlin at not having the confidence to ever approach anyone I had seen for the first time that evening and thought "they're a bit of all right" and, in many cases, sneaking off home without telling anyone. My least proud moment in this regard was the time when I successfully escaped from going clubbing during the walk down to the bus stop that would take us into town. Several of us doubled back and played Half-Life using the free phone connections between our rooms instead.
Anyway, all this is an exceedingly long-winded way of saying that Andie and I had a thoroughly agreeable time at the Aqua Sana today. We tried most of the 24 "spa experiences" that were available to us, and both of us determined that we like saunas and steam rooms a lot more than we both thought we did. Turns out neither of us had ever really been to a good sauna or steam room, with our respective experiences mostly consisting of hotel saunas (a shed in the corner of the car park) and steam rooms (a hot cupboard next to the swimming pool) rather than, y'know, somewhere that does it properly.
And man, it sure is nice to just relax. You're not allowed to take your phone in to the spa, thank goodness, so all there is to do is just sit back, relax, perhaps reflect on a few things, maybe even have a nap. There are, in fact, several rooms set aside specifically for napping, and while I think it might be a bit of a waste of your entry fee to go along to a place like Aqua Sana and just nap in one of these rooms, I also wouldn't blame anyone who did.
You have a lot of options in that regard, too. As well as the aforementioned Forest Cave, which is a prime nap spot so long as your bladder isn't susceptible to the sound of trickling water, there was another room downstairs that was just pretty dark and filled with contoured, heated loungers, then in a room beyond that a room with straight-up water beds. There were several other rooms with comfy sofas and beds to use, too; we tried most of them during our visit, and the thought only occurred to us after we'd been there a while that we wondered how many people per year got thrown out for boning. (No-one was, to our knowledge, engaging in such activities while we were there, even though there were plenty of couples, like us, sharing the beds.)
So all in all, it was very nice. And, as a fat, unfit fortysomething, spending £75 for four hours of chilling out in nice-smelling hot rooms and then being provided with beds and other comfy things to nap on sounds infinitely preferable to spending an indeterminate amount of money getting pissed in a darkened room, being unable to have a conversation with anyone without yelling, having to negotiate drunken strangers and having to moderate one's alcohol intake to find the perfect balance between being pleasantly wobbly, maudlin and vomity vomity.
We're already making idle plans to come again next year. This was a good choice. Well done, me.
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