Unfortunately we didn’t have a great experience at the Norton Park.

On the plus-side, the facilities were modern and seemed comprehensive. The massage room was reasonably well-equipped and spacious, and the location does feel well away from the city bustle. In the right hands (and it sounds like others have had more joy) it could be really nice.

My wife and I chose this spot to kick off a nice weekend of relaxation with a 4pm massage last Friday. Because we missed the turning for the village, we arrived a few minutes late to our appointment, but were pretty apologetic on arrival. The first thing the receptionist said to us was “Well, you’ll get less time now”. Fair enough, of course, but that surly approach set the tone for the rest of our experience and didn’t serve as the warmest of welcomes.

My wife and I headed to separate rooms for the Swedish massages we had booked (why do so few places in the UK seem to have a twin massage room?). On lying down for mine, the lady conducting my massage struck up conversation like, “So why were you late then?” and so on, hardly setting me up for the relaxation I was there to enjoy. The massage itself was poorly executed, and the lady had a heavy cold. This meant that she sniffed constantly throughout and later in the session snot actually started dripping out of her nose and onto my back. She then cut the session shorter still than the time I’d wasted by being late. This might have been a small mercy in some ways, but left me feeling quite cheated by the whole experience. In stark contrast with what I’ve enjoyed elsewhere, I think I felt more agitated and stressed as a result of the massage than before I went in.

She then told me to get dressed and go through to the relaxation room. I was a bit perplexed as to what to do with the gown and slippers I’d been given, and why I wasn’t going to be encouraged to shower off the (reeking, sticky, snot-mixed) massage oil I had on my back before getting back into my clothes. I’d not been shown a locker or any changing rooms, so although I thought we’d be able use the pool etc. afterwards, nobody was on hand to tell me where any of that was. My wife was waiting for me in the relaxation room, but had been told to change into her gown and had not been shown a locker either, so we were pretty confused as to what we were supposed to be doing. The relaxation room itself had one miserable carton of apple juice in an otherwise empty fridge, and a bowl full of crumbs that had once been some kind of seed or nut mix. Although she had been spared a snot-bath, my wife had also had a poor massage, cut even shorter than mine and with no attempt to establish whether the pressure or areas of focus were right (they weren’t – it had been far too soft for my wife’s preference, who gets tight muscles through a repetitive activity at work). Still trying to figure out what we were supposed to do given that I was clothed and my wife was robed and neither of us had showered, the lady who had done my wife’s massage came into the room and dumped her clothes on the floor saying she had “left them in the room” (but that was in the absence of any alternative suggestion). The lady immediately left the room, so there wasn’t even an opportunity to find out where to change again! The whole experience left her pretty humiliated.

So, we both experienced poor massages and terrible customer service. You get a better massage for a third of the price in Chinatown in London; you get more friendliness by striking up a conversation at the bus stop; you get more pampering at a sofa showroom than what was on offer at Norton Park. We spoke to another couple on our way out who had had a similarly poor, moody and rushed massage experience and who were let down by it all. Asked by the receptionist when I was paying whether I had enjoyed myself, I pleasantly but honestly told them the above. They just said “oh” and left it at that.

Perhaps they were having an off-day, but my goodness, I’d rather set fire to twelve ten pound notes than go through that (one more time – snot-bathed) experience again. Luckily it was so bad that it made us laugh quite a bit later in the weekend, but we won’t be going back.