You will emerge smelling like just about anything you can imagine, from a mixed fruit salad to a giant dill pickle.

And so there I was lying face-down in the sand, being pummelled, prodded and sat upon by an iron-fingered beach boy who, for a grand finale to his super-special-economy-deluxe massage (discount rate for beautiful ladies), ran up and down by spine slapping me with his grimy hand-towel and yelling, "Two tents! Two tents!" all of which was met with much amusement by onlookers who may well have thought he was ordering a couple of circus tents to accommodate the growing audience. In fact, he was saying, "Too tense! Too tense!" which is, of course, the mantra of masseurs and masseuses from the beaches of Bali to the sterile salons of Beverly Hills.

I have been massaged in many foreign parts. Of the globe, that is. It's one of the great pleasures of a resort-style holiday to treat yourself to "the works". Which will variously be described as Royal Spa Treatment, Rejuvenation Theapy, Imperial Massage or, if you are in Chennai, India, in a back street near the Taj Coromandel Hotel, "Mr Chatterjee's First-Class Fingers by Royal Appointment."

Promises will be made of unlocking the time-misted secrets of eternal youth and finely balanced yin and yang. "Exfoliation" will be uttered as a mystical password, an entr?e to the stripping of not just dead skin but years of anxiety, tension and failed fake tans. Ass's milk, papaya, pulp, avocado oil, honey from queen bees, lotus petals and heady herbs and spices will be involved. You will emerge smelling like just about anything you can imagine, from a mixed fruit salad to a giant dill pickle. If you are very lucky you will not develop an allergy to a rare Tibetan herb or break out in a rash caused by ground orchid stems. Because these conditions are so irritating and scratchy they can only be remedied, of course, by another hour's treatment.

During all these types of body handling, it's essential to make the subject feel as vulnerable as possible. This is especially so with such semi-tortures as hydrotherapy. Basically, you stand against a tiled wall, stripped starkers, while a person who is not nude but is, in fact, wearing more rubber and plastic than a Tory fetishist, sprays you with the sort of serious hose normally seen on a fire truck. You are splayed against the wall in a most undignified fashion and, if you are a man, your private arrangements may come in for an awful battering.

The massage a la mode for the new millennium is aromatherapy. This is completely civilised: all those floral scented oils, smoothly applied while you drift off to faraway rainforests to the tune of mating-whale dirges. Things are very different on the beaches of Asia and the spa centres fringing Israel's Dead Sea. On the sandy shores of Goa, freelance beach masseurs offer ayurvedic massages which are bliss of a sort but, depending on the character of the chap involved, could be far more sensual than memsahib would necessarily want.
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In a Dead Sea health club, you'll be lathered with great lobs of viscous mud and left to lie on a stone slab like a marinated piece of meat. A matronly woman in a shower cap, nurse's uniform and plastic raincoat then appears with a watering can. If the mud has been left a mite too long and it's started to set, she'll call for a hose. Then you must grip the sides of the slab and hang on for dear life while she holds the mighty rubber serpent and comes at you as if you were on fire. Weeks later, you realise you still have stray bits of mud about your person-navel, ears, underarm creases, unmentionable crevices.

The growth of the massage and aromatherapy business can be easily correlated with the stress of modern lifestyle. We have this ridiculous situation where half of us are doing the jobs of two people while the other half can't even find a job for one person. That is, unless the under-employed become masseurs and set up shop to cater for the over-employed-a nice full circle of revenge, really.