“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”
Hand sanitiser is now a major part of our lives. Anything with over 60 per cent alcohol content and a great smell gets the thumbs up, says Caroline Phillips. These are the best hand sanitisers on the market.
Caroline Phillips puts an electric and a pedal bike through their paces, plus some elite cycling gear tips…
View Web pageIf you want a masseur with magic fingers who’s bookable throughout the year, Esther Cato is your lady. It’s not just that this healer-meets-ultimate-stress-buster-meets-masseur is so available. It’s also that she’s so good. So thank your lucky stars that government restrictions have just lifted, and book to see Esther in your London home for a deep tissue therapeutic massage. Or bag her for a pregnancy massage. Or a Swedish one.
Expect everything from a deluge of divorces (those already unhappy couples who were holed up during the pandemic) through to a mass exodus to live in the countryside, far from the madding, (masked) crowd. Anticipate dealing with your tubby Coronatummy – and body hair (that’s you, ladies) – and possibly finding a new career too.
Here’s our guide to the top dozen services and practitioners for the next steps. Whether you’re after the world’s best off-Zoom yoga, the ultimate post-lockdown facial or mouth-watering new foodie experiences, read on.
Meet the people who will get you shipshape in mind, body and soul.
Deep under Regent Street, you’ll find yourself immersed in the Hotel Café Royal’s specialist Watsu pool with small floats attached to your shins. Here, Steve Karle guides you in an hour- long underwater dance of stretching, shiatsu, joint mobilisation and craniosacral work. You’ll feel weightless, and will leave the pool deliciously spaced out, your aches eased. Then you’ll bliss out again with the other parts of this Four Elements treatment: a body massage, hot stones and scalp massage.
Facialogy? What’s that? It’s a combo of a blissful Vaishaly Signature Facial with a relaxing, health-promoting reflexology treatment.
The quick read: Sheryl Close offers Somatic Experiencing and Trauma Therapy, and her sessions include an eclectic mixture of skills she’s developed over the years – including psychotherapy, massage therapy, addiction counselling and Gestalt therapy. The focus is primarily on Somatic Experiencing, and Sheryl’s therapy is for anybody who feels stuck in their life, who want to connect more deeply emotionally with him/herself, and who want to release historical destructive patterns. Sheryl can be booked for an individual, hour-long session at private practices in London or Bedfordshire in the UK.
If you want to zzzz in a 12th-century former nobleman’s castle – set in 740 tranquil acres of rolling hills – then try Castello del Nero’s new Sleep Retreat created with ESPA. Bag a suite with Pompeian-style, 18th-century frescoes and let the butler draw you a steaming, essence-infused bath strewn with rose petals.
I am lying on a wooden massage bed as two women rub my naked body with hot pouches of cooked rice, milk and medicinal herbs. They massage in tandem my legs, hip joints and up to my neck. A little gloop escapes the poultice bags each time and soon my body is covered with a gluey white residue. This is navarakizhi, a treatment claimed to reduce joint stiffness and relieve depression.
I’m at Soukya, a health retreat outside Bangalore that offers traditional Indian cures for conditions from hay fever to diabetes and strives to “restore the natural balance of your mind, body and spirit”.
Caroline Phillips unearths the people who really matter to the people who really matter. The doctors, practitioners, therapists and service providers who celebrities and folk with their finger truly on the pulse have on speed dial. An alphabetical guide to the country’s leaders in everything from psychotherapy to gut health. From who you should visit for semi-permanent make-up to hair removal. Not to mention the super-facialists and who to choose for acupuncture or to accompany you to buy your clothes…
What links Rachel Weisz, Kirsten Dunst and Sophie Dahl? Oh, and Elle Macpherson, Meg Ryan and Gwyneth Paltrow too. They’re all clients of Vaishaly, the super facialist. She’s also brow sculptor (threader) to the superstars. As if that isn’t enough, she and one of her team of whizzo therapists have just started offering microblading —a form of eyebrow tattooing, about which more later. Plus Vaishaly has recently expanded into the neighbouring building to open a nail bar offering everything you could ever want for the tips of your hands.
Dr Shomit Mitter is a hard man to categorise. Yes, he’s a hypnotherapist. Yes, he mentored Booker-prize winner Arundhati Roy —who pays tribute to him in her book, the God of Small Things. Oh and he ran a multi-million pound aviation business in the nineties – and found himself being shadowed by the KGB for his pains. Why? Because he had an M.Phil from Oxford and a PhD from Cambridge and had written two seminal books on theatre – so he must have been a spy doing those aviation deals in the wilds of Uzbekistan.
Facialogy? What’s that? It’s a combo of a blissful Vaishaly Signature Facial with a relaxing, health-promoting reflexology.
I am lying on a wooden massage bed as two women rub my naked body with hot pouches of cooked rice, milk and medicinal herbs.…
Mornings were worst. I would wake with lead in my veins, a jackboot pressing on my chest and my body rigid, as if set in…