Dumped, Actually(68)

‘Sounds bleedin’ fabulous!’ Wimsy replies, sealing my fate. I can’t very well disappoint the poor bugger now, can I?

Nope. Sensory deprivation with my new friend it shall be. And fingers crossed it does what Lizzy says it will.

Fingers also crossed that the salty water doesn’t pickle my skin too much. I have no love for eating gherkins, so I don’t particularly want to look like one.



Floaters takes up the entire ground floor of a rather grand old Georgian house. There’s a chiropractic clinic on the floor above it, with a holistic therapy business on the third and final floor above that. It’s like a one-stop shop for physical and mental self-improvement.

. . . or, given the prices of some of the treatments on offer across all three floors, it’s a gigantic Georgian-shaped money vacuum that’ll leave you penniless in seconds, and not quite convinced any of it was actually worth it.

Now Lizzy isn’t around to fire his curiosity and his loins, Wimsy isn’t too sure about our impending visit to a sensory deprivation tank.

‘I don’t like baths,’ he says, looking at a large poster of one of the pods as we wait at reception to be taken through.

‘It’s not a bath, Wims. Unless you pour a whole box of salt in with you every time you have one.’

‘It looks like a bath. A bath with a lid.’ He looks at me disapprovingly. ‘Baths should not have lids, Ollie.’

‘Well, I can’t argue with you on that one.’

I have to confess to a certain amount of apprehension myself. I’m not someone who suffers from claustrophobia, but I can’t say the idea of being enclosed in a dark space sounds all that relaxing, or life affirming, to me.

But Lizzy was absolutely right about mindfulness, so I guess I’ll have to trust her on this as well.

A young man in a Floaters T-shirt appears at reception and asks us whether we have a booking or not. I tell him we have, and he proceeds to empty my wallet and eat all of my money, before moving on to my clothes and my car.

That’s what it feels like, at least. This sensory deprivation doesn’t come cheap. I’m not sure how much I’ll enjoy being deprived of my senses, but I hope it’s a lot more than being deprived of one hundred and eighty pounds to lie in salt for half an hour.

The reception guy tells us where we should go to get changed into our swimming trunks, and where we should meet him down the hallway, where the pods are kept.

I had to lend Wimsy a pair of my old swimming trunks, obviously. This is how these things work. The Chinese have a proverb that states if you save someone’s life, you are responsible for that life. I certainly appear to be responsible for Wimsy’s wardrobe.

We both jump into our respective swimmers (mine from M&S, his sadly from Primark) in cubicles in the changing rooms and meet Mr Floaters outside the room that houses the pods.

‘All ready to go, then?’ he asks us as we self-consciously approach him.

‘Yes?’ I say, hesitantly.

Wimsy mumbles something about baths and lids.

‘Great! Then let’s get you set up and going.’

Mr Floaters holds the door open, and we enter the room, to be presented with the opening scene from every slow-paced science fiction movie you’ve ever seen – when the crew of the ship awake from hypersleep.

The sensory pods are arranged in a circle around a central bit of decking. Two of the enormous white blobs have their mouth-like lids open invitingly – in much the same way that a shark does.

Mr Floaters explains that all we have to do is lie in the pod, in the temperature-controlled salty water, and he’ll do the rest. The pod lids are shut automatically, and will re-open once our allocated time has passed. After we’ve dried ourselves off with the towels he’s going to provide for us, we can then don fluffy dressing gowns and partake in the fresh chocolate or lemon sorbet that Floaters offers in its small, but ever so lovely, relaxation room.

I am a mere thirty minutes away from chocolate sorbet. Even if this floating in a dark tank thing doesn’t do it for me, then surely something cold, sweet and chocolate-flavoured will.

Somebody really needs to invent chocolate that doesn’t have any calories in it. They’d destroy the entire therapy business of the United Kingdom in one fell swoop.

Wimsy looks decidedly nervous about all of this, so I step forward and climb into my tank to show him that everything will (probably) be alright.

The water is neither hot nor cold, but quite tepid. I lie down in it, and it doesn’t make me feel hot or cold, either. I’m assuming this is the point.

The level of buoyancy my body achieves is quite amazing, though. I had to give my weight along with Wimsy’s when I made the booking, and now I can see why. They have to get the salt levels just right, so you can bob about with no fear of going under.

‘See, Wims? It’s fine,’ I call over to him.

I can feel myself relaxing already. The feeling of floating around like this is quite lovely in and of itself.

Wims peers into my tank and gives me a look of suspicion, but then he does indeed climb into his own tank and lie down.

‘I feel like I’m being pickled!’ he cries over the lid of his pod.

‘Please relax, sir,’ Mr Floaters says. ‘Enjoy the experience.’

Wimsy doesn’t reply, but neither does he leap back out of the pod, so I’ll assume he’s still willing to go along with this. If there wasn’t a promised date with Lizzy to discuss the experience, though, I’m not sure he would.