On kindness, L'Ombre Dans L'Eau, care parcels and the sublime LibertyLondonGirl

Kindness.  I like kindness.  Simple kindnesses smack me in the heart, bowl me over, make me cry.
I came back home from a funeral at the weekend.  I'd crashed face first into my past and it had brought me up short.  I also crashed, quite literally, into the closing doors of a tube train and consequently now have two bruises running the lengths of both arms and a freshly re-torn rotator cuff.  I hurt.

'There's a parcel on your desk,' Adrian said.  And so there was.  A long white box with tissue paper hiding lots of little boxes and bags.  I fell on it like a small child at Christmas and uncovered the most deliciously divine care package of gorgeous things.  Perricone foundation (I’ll report back); the perfect nude lipstick (Clinique Matte Suede, if you’re wondering) and the perfect nail varnish to give a subtle shimmer to stress-bitten nails (Estee Lauder Blushing Lilac).  It didn’t end there.  As I snuffled down the parcel, all other kinds of lovelies tumbled out, including some of my very favourite natural brands (Dr Hauschka, Annee de Mamiel).  And ooooooh… But wait…let me backtrack and explain how I became the recipient of such a cornucopia of cosmetic riches.

Back in Austria, at VIVAMAYR I met Sasha Wilkins, aka Liberty London Girl.  She introduced herself as a blogger but that's somewhat like Mo Farah saying, 'I run a bit'.  Sasha is a Queen of Dragons who commands legions of Unsullied (oops, sorry, bit over-excited about Game of Thrones starting again).  I mean she’s a digital journalist, ex- Wall Street Journal, ex-Vogue (and many others) and a full-on TV bod but, since 2009, she has been running her own digital seven kingdoms of LLG Media.

Way cuter than Daenerys, dontcha think?  

This woman doesn’t just do digital, she IS digital – she rocks social media with her blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest (click on the links - you can lose yourself in recipes, nice things and legions of dogs for hours).  She has a digital media consultancy business LLG Consults, Wilkins & Ross, a digital film production company, and…and…and…and…so on it goes.  But what you really need to know is that she loves sausage dogs and she is a damn nice person.  Kind.

I’d asked her about foundation (as you do when trying to take your mind off chewing an endless spelt roll) and she’d recommended Perricone No Foundation Foundation.  I’d said how rubbish I was at make-up and that I really needed to up my game.  We talked a bit about various brands and then someone wandered past and sniffed the air and asked who was wearing that absolutely gorgeous scent.  I naturally assumed it would be Sasha but no, it was me – squeezing the last gasp out of a sample bottle of Diptyque’s L’Ombre Dans l’Eau. Seriously, how could anyone resist a scent called the Shadow in the Water?  It’s gorgeous, utterly gorgeous – warm and yet crisp at the same time. Like the grown-up sophisticated sister of another old favourite, Jo Malone’s Lime Basil Mandarin.

Anyhow, back to my parcel.  Yes, she’d sent it.  Not just enough face and body stuff to make me look almost presentable, but also…a whole coffret of Diptyque samples.

I was quite overcome and, yes, I found myself snuffling a bit (rather like a sausage dog actually). Because it wasn’t so much that this was a box of serious loveliness but that everything had been picked out with such care and thought.  It was kind, damn kind.  And, like I say, that makes me cry.

How gorgeous is Lettice? Pic (c) Sasha Wilkins

Anyhow.  If you haven’t already made the acquaintance of LLG - you really should. I have huge admiration for her because she made the decision to wave goodbye to the corporate nonsense of mainstream media in which advertising and editorial are so incestuous they need therapy and a social worker.  She now writes about the things she loves, the things that interest her, on her own terms – so that includes a lot of fashion and beauty but also flowers and food.  Not to mention sausage dogs.  Just check out the pics of Lovely Lettice, a dog with a great line in photogenic stares and her own ramp onto the bed.  She’s also extremely ethical and very honest. That’s Sasha, btw, not Lettice (although, who knows, maybe she’s an honest and ethical dachshund – why not?).  My second dog was a dachshund, btw, but that's another story.

Oh, and she (Sasha, not Lettice - I really shouldn't have started confusing things with Lettice) has recently published her first cookbook, Friends, Food, Family – so if you like uncomplicated recipes, bursting with flavour and served with flare, check it out.  Click on the pic below for more details.

High-tech and low-choice at VIVAMAYR

Yes, I'm hugely lucky that my job lets me travel so much and go to such incredible places.  But, you know, it's not all pampering massages and luscious facials, no sirree.

Sometimes you get what you need rather than what you'd really like.  Here at VIVAMAYR, there's no perusing long menus of spa 'journeys' and beauty treatments; no umming and aahing about which massage to have.  You see the doctor, who orders a battery of tests.  Actually I got off quite lightly with just free radical measuring and mineral analysis (maybe because I looked wild-eyed and terrified about the potential costs - each and every test costs extra here and, although as journalists, we get a certain amount for free, even so it's apparently quite easy to rack up a bill that runs into hundreds or even thousands for extras).
So, they took my blood and gave me an infusion of vitamins and minerals in its place...

Apparently I'm not breathing properly - well, there's a surprise!  So I've been doing some IHHT (aka Hypoxytraining or Altitude training) - fetching mask, huh?

Next up, I was booked in for a 'relaxing' massage but...  My therapist Jan drove his thumb into my shoulder. 'On a scale of one to ten, where ten is unbearable, how much does it hurt?' he said.
'Er,up at about a nine,' I said, tears in my eyes.
He nodded, and kept pressing.
But hey, it's all good.  Turns out I've got a rotator cuff injury (have been struggling with arm pain for months) and no amount of soft soothing effluerage is going to fix that.

Then there's the food.  But let's save that for another post, huh?

Scorching my ladycarriage by remote at the new VIVA MAYR at Altaussee

So, I was shown round my room at the brand new VIVA MAYR clinic, and it all looked pretty standard.  Nice bathroom - all the usual gear except...
'The toilet has a remote control,' said my guide with a flourish.  I frowned. Something was surely lost in translation.

She logged the look, reached to the wall and plucked out, yup, a remote control.  'Very high-tech,' she said.  'Just like in  Japan.'

Okaaay.  But this is Austria.  Back at the original clinic I seem to remember the loos all had a shelf so you could inspect your outgoing messages but this was something quite, quite different.  Could you fast forward with it? Pause mid-stool? Record your, um, progress???

We looked at one another, the loo and I.  It narrowed its eyes and gave me a challenging 'you'll never dare test-drive me, you scaredy cat, unhygienic English person' sneer.
'You bet I will, you weird unfeasibly bizarre Japanese contraption,' I said.  And looked around for the instruction manual.
What?  Nothing.  Picked up the remote and tried to figure it out.  I mean, really...a picture of a woman (water jets straight up the fanny?); a symbol for wind (drying presumably) and a flower (deodorising?).
Oh, what the hell.  I took the same approach as I do with any remote -  just flail around pressing buttons willy-nilly.  Oooh...the fanny current was weird but not unpleasant.  Then...ouch!  OUCH!  It was trying to nuke my ladycarriage.  I swear I got up singed.

Anyhow.  I still didn't really see the point.  Until the next day.
You start each day like this:

"7.15AM - Taking VIVAMAYR morning drink (intestine cleaning).  Altaussee's Glaubersalt directly from the inner mountain-spring into your bottle.  Pour some warm water into this and drink slowly." (sic)

Ye gods, it tastes disgusting.  Like downing a carafe of ocean.  Apparently it's supposed to suck all the muck out of your digestive system.

Then you get breakfast, lunch and dinner which consist of...very little.  So my dinner looked like this:

No, those aren't dog chew sticks - they're soy bread rolls.  And yup, that's a pot of herb tea.  And yup, that's it.

Then the gurgling began.  Pretty soon I had a concerto going on in my guts - a quartet of stomach, duodenum, ileum and colon.  Not long after that I found myself walking smartly to the loo.  And again...and again...and again...  Let's just say I clocked 15 times within the space of an hour.

And that was when the loo gave me a knowing look.  'Admit it,' it said.  'You need me.'

This may not be the start of a beautiful relationship but let's just say, we've reached an agreement,