A day I'll never forget at the beauty salon

Rather than use it as a door-stop, Fanny has been rifling through the Yellow Pages this morning in order to find a beauty salon nearby.  One or two of my quiffs have lost their bounce, my nails are chipped and maybe a Brazilian bikini wax, too.

Imagine my surprise when I found the most prestigiously-named establishment: Olga's L.A. Hair and Beauty Bar, based in the beautiful oasis of Milton Keynes.

L.A = Los Angeles!  Why, anything with that in the title must be a classy establishment, so I rang them, and without any further a-do, I booked a full day's beauty session and got Juan to drive me straight there in a jiffy.  

Imagine my horror when the limousine wouldn't fit down the little alley where the salon was located, so Juan dropped me off, and I made my way across cobbles (in 12" stilettos) only to find this rundown dive!  To my dismay, this was Olga's LA Hair and Beauty Bar.

I was incandescent with rage: glowing furiously in the pallid Milton Keynes sunlight like a hot-bulb about to explode.

I was just about to turn the other way and report them to Trading Standards for be-smirching the good name of the city of Los Angeles (where everything is glamorous and beautiful), when the door opened, and a huge, very butch Jamaican woman the size of a small house came out and forcefully shepherded me inside.

 

I'm sad to say the interior was just as awful as the exterior: drab-green plastic linoleum with such a hideous pattern that it almost induced in me a psychotic episode; rows of sweaty, brown plastic treatment chairs; and equipment that must have been salvaged from the 1950s.

 Electroconvulsive shock therapy or a hair-curler? -
we'll never know!

The beauty assistant - whose name was Olga, and who didn't seem to speak a word of English - placed a welcoming cup of tea down in front of me.

This was it.

It looked as if some small animal had died in that cup.  There's no way my Marilyn Monroe-replica, £1 million-insured lips are going anywhere near that revolting receptacle.  Filthy.  Disgusting.  It was time to leave.  I stood up, knocking the cup and its thick, grey contents over and said out loud "just popping to the ladies room" with the intention of climbing out the toilet window and running off into the street.

 Sadly, I had never anticipated that the ladies would have iron bars on the windows.  So with a tiny whimper, I meekly slid back into the treatment room, and was forced to sit down and blindly, I chose the first thing on the menu: Hawaiian Surprise followed by Hawaiian Sunset.

The treatment consisted of being stripped naked, massaged with mashed rotting grapes and peaches, rubbed with a scouring pad, before being showered down with ice-cold water, smeared with English mustard, and then covered in iced lemon juice, before being wrapped in tin-foil and left for an hour and a half under a heat-lamp whilst being served a ten-shot pint served through a funnel appropriately called the Head Fucker.  

What a stunning experience it was.  Physically and emotionally brutalised, I staggered, on one leg, out at the end of the 4-hour session, £185 poorer, and foaming, in horror, at the mouth.    Not even the finale, the spray-tan - nick-named Hawaiian Sunset - was a success.  The ridiculously horrid treatment has left me with skin the colour of a tangerine.