“Hey Paul, what did you do for your blog this week?”

“Oh, I just floated about, really.”

“Hahahahaha oh my God Paul you’re actually amazing.”

So I hope you enjoyed that little sketch. Anyway, this week I sampled the unusual thrill of a floatation tank – a spa treatment, available at Rainbow Room International in Glasgow’s Royal Exchange Square, designed to help a person relax and unwind.

For the uninitiated (such as all of the human beings that exist), floatation treatment involves a shallow pool of warm, salt-treated water in a light- and sound-proof tank. You submerge yourself in the water, let your body float to the top, and enjoy the ensuing deaf-blind tranquillity. It’s “the most effective and incredible means of stress relief available”, according to floatation tank sales company floatworks.com, and what reason would they possibly have to lie about floatation tanks?

More to the point, what kind of jackass would I have to be to pass up the opportunity to experience a means of stress relief capable of sitting astride the implausibly disparate descriptors of ‘most effective’ and ‘most incredible’? I mean, the mind boggles. Floatation tanks, according to floatworks.com, are a more incredible way of de-stressing than achieving transcendental enlightenment through meditation, and more effective at the task than morphine. That’s like an actor winning ‘Most Emotionally Harrowing Performance’ and ‘Best Fart Jokes’. That’s like being down in your graduation yearbook as ‘Most Likely To Succeed’ and ‘Biggest Two And A Half Men Fan’.

Despite high praise from unbiased sources, I foresaw some potential problems with visiting a spa this week in order to increase my relaxation levels. Here’s one: I might already be maxed out. Since finishing my exams this summer, I’ve considered events beginning at half one in the afternoon as ‘reason to set an alarm clock’. Suffice to say, I’ve not had the world on my shoulders over the last couple of months. What position was I in to judge any method of reducing stress?

Luckily, life provides. In the four days before I was due to have the floatation treatment, I received the last of the grades that would contribute to my final degree classification, the date and time of my first shift at a new job, some cruelly polite rejection letters for internships taking place after the summer, and the news that I hadn’t qualified for a postgraduate scholarship I had applied for. I was also in the process of dealing with a bit of hypochondria (the most shamelessly decadent of all ailments, but an ailment nonetheless) manifesting itself in the nagging feeling that I might have MS. By the time I arrived at the well-lit doorway of Rainbow Room International, I was so hard-bitten and broken down by the world that you could’ve mistaken me for a real grown-up.

I don’t want to conjure up the image of an unworldly, bed-wetting ninny, but at this point in the narrative it’s important for you to know that I’m also afflicted with a mild fear of lifts. Armed with that knowledge you’ll be much better placed to understand why, on arrival at my watery rendezvous, I was a bit on edge.

“The spa’s on level three, and there’s a lift on the half-landing,” announces our friendly Rainbow Room receptionist, omitting any reference to the stairs that must surely also exist.

“Thanks very much”, my mouth replies, while my stomach does a familiar little Oh Christ. The Rainbow Room International lift is one of those tiny one-person numbers where you can basically work out which bit of the mechanism is at work at any point by listening carefully to the grinding and churning going on above your head. As an added treat, before releasing you into your destination, it pauses for 15 seconds, as if debating whether you’re worthy of passengership or if it would prefer you to slowly die. Nobody has ever needed relaxation therapy more than I did when I reached the third floor.

They’re lovely when you’re up there, though. The top floor receptionist (think of her as a benevolent version of the ground floor one) explained how the tank works in great detail, in case I was an idiot, but at no point adopted a tone of voice that suggested she thought I was an idiot – an obscure but handy talent. I asked where the toilet was. There’s no universal western symbol for ‘toilet’, we just use a little figure in a skirt and a little figure in (presumably) trousers, and the spa only had one toilet, so they had opted to adorn the door with a little figure in a skirt. Me and the receptionist silently acknowledged that it was a bit odd for me – the anthropologic realisation of a little figure in trousers – to be using a toilet with that symbol, and we laughed a bit and I felt I had made a friend.

And, once I was in the tank, I could see what people get out of it. You only really acknowledge your senses when they’re actively at work, looking for a pen or listening to music, but they actually never get a moment’s rest. You don’t need to seek sights, sounds and feelings out at all: sit down and do nothing all day and you’ll be presented, unwillingly, with sunlight streaming through a window and police sirens from a street away. In the floatation tank you get to a point, relatively quickly, where you can’t figure out how much of your body is submerged, or if your eyes are open or closed, or how long you’ve been in there for. Getting no information of any kind from the outside world, even for a short while, is a unique experience. I won’t say it was great – it was the definition of underwhelming – but it was certainly new. I began to enjoy it for its novelty.

But then disaster struck. As I sailed away mentally I managed to become dislodged physically, and drifted towards the right-hand side of the tank, where my foot touched the edge. This panicked me (floating makes you fragile) and I jumped a little. This knocked me off balance, and, slowly and hilariously, I capsized, the left side of my body sinking into the murky depths while the right side remained optimistically buoyant. Eventually I realised that the best way to right myself would be through the use of my hands, but not before I had exhausted the option of sticking half of my face into the salty solution, stinging my eyes to buggery and coating my mouth in the abject horribleness of floatation tank water. In the process I submerged a cut at the side of my fingernail, obtaining an unnecessarily literal demonstration of the source of the phrase ‘pouring salt on the wounds’. Cutting my losses, I stood up, coughing, spluttering, naked and reeling from just how badly I had managed to mess up relaxation.

It was only a minute of a process that had been otherwise pleasant (if uneventful), but shortly thereafter a staff member knocked on the tank to inform me that my hour was up. The powerful mellow I had built up over 55 minutes of floating was rendered essentially useless by the harrowing ordeal of the last five. You pay at the end, so it was only after I had emerged, sore and frightened, from artificial death (most people seem to go for ‘womb’ but that wasn’t the vibe I was getting) that I was relieved of £33.

My wallet was so light afterwards that it could float!

(Hahahahaha oh my God Paul you’re actually amazing.)

*

Next Monday, Paul tries Star Wars.