The missionary of massage

This is a small room in a midrange hotel. It’s a clinical room, part of the hotel’s “spa”, a term which no longer owes much to its origins in the Belgian mountain town of that name which was famed for its healing waters.

It is now about women dressed in white hospital coats applying soothing treatments often involving seaweed and tropical fruit.

When I say it’s peaceful, that is not to say it is silent. It has, in fact, an unctuous aural background of recorded music that swirls, swells and ebbs. Perhaps it is the sound of whales singing songs of lost love or Tibetan monks playing nose flutes through a heavy cold. Whatever it is, the word that springs to mind is spooky, which is probably not how the therapists see it, but it’s so obscurely, brain-foggingly intense that it makes you want to snigger like a schoolboy at a funeral.

I am here at this Caribbean branch of the worldwide Spooky Spas network to have a massage. Not my idea, you understand. It’s a common by-product of having a wife who goes in for this sort of thing. “You should try it too. It might make you less grumpy.” There are, of course, various kinds of massage, from the therapeutic kind on offer here, which uses oil containing the homeopathic wonder-herb arnica, to the altogether less innocent random rubs offered by untrained, unlicensed, uninhibited and unprincipled women as you laze on the beach on your sunlounger.

Make all the rationalisations you like, and castigate that sniggering school boy, but the male of the species gets a kick out of this kind of thing that women either don’t or choose not to admit. My first experience of massage was many years ago and work-related, having been offered a free one by a woman who had just set up a small business and wanted me to write about it (as a form of free advertising - journalists get that all the time). So I turned up at this woman’s house and five minutes later I was naked on her therapeutic couch with my nose jammed down a hole at one end. The nose business aside, this was a not unwelcome way to spend a quiet Tuesday afternoon, but it needed huge reserves of professional discipline to stay focused on the assignment rather than just succumbing to a sensation that could veer off onto an entirely different road if you’re not careful.

However, that was then and this is now. Different decade, different location, different practitioner. This woman is a petite, slim Asian woman — Korean, she tells me. Her conversation couldn’t be further from suggestive; within five minutes she has launched into a well-rehearsed routine about religion and the repression of Christianity in Muslim countries.

She’s working the same handfuls of flesh and inflicting the same occasional flashes of pain as the enthusiastic amateur all those years ago, but she hardly seems to notice what her hands are doing. This is not a massage, it’s an exercise in preaching to a captive audience. As it happens, she is preaching to the converted, but no matter how often I grunt my agreement (which is about as expressive as you can get with your face squeezed into a small plastic orifice), she ploughs on with the tales of persecution, torture and murder. It’s a good thing she seems to like me, because in this kind of situation there would be not much you could do about it if, Bond film-style, she placed a scorpion under your modesty towel and induced the most excruciating death.

So, my masseuse is a missionary, telling tales of Jesus as I lie like putty in her hands. She’s taking it all very seriously – and it is a serious subject.

While the world in what used to be regarded as Christian countries frowns upon any anti-Muslim sentiment, even to the extent of merely sticking up for ourselves, atrocities are committed against our fellows in places where they don’t receive the instant worldwide coverage that accompanies a sneeze from the White House or Downing Street. And we’re supposed to keep quiet about it.

The increasingly non-religious, even anti-religious attitude that pervades our society is driving good people underground because their message of tolerance is not reciprocated.

Big trouble is just around the corner: worldwide trouble that is either going to wipe out one great religion and leave the world at the mercy of another, or result in a return to faith for the millions of non-believers who currently think there is no higher authority than themselves. And the message will be delivered not by p r i e s t s or polit i c i ans , but by humb l e , low-profile people such as my Korean masseuse.