James Leith

The intended heading for this piece was to have been ‘Spa Wars’, since the demand for luxury pampering in country-house-hotel surroundings seems insatiable. Three country-house-hotel spas have opened within half an hour’s drive of here (on the Wiltshire/Gloucestershire borders) in the last 18 months, and no expense spared. Even if you knew what thalassotherapy was, would you pay a pound a minute to get it? Or the same amount to reap the benefits of the Hammam bed? Apparently this last, being a sort of solid massage table, is butch enough to get men to agree to a pampering massage without feeling even a little bit gay. But who are these customers? Who pays for a weekend in an incredibly luxurious hotel and never leaves the premises?

If you thought that wooden jigsaw puzzles were a quaint blast from the past, long consigned to the dustbin of recreational history, along with sticks, hoops, tops and diabolo, let me assure you that it ain't necessarily so. First thought up by Thomas Spilsbury, a printer of maps, in the early 1760s, the original 'dissections' were created to help children learn their geography. Thomas pasted maps of the four continents (yes, we have no Australia) to thin sheets of mahogany, then cut around the borders of each country with a fretsaw, and sold the puzzles in plain wooden boxes. The British Library has just obtained a Spilsbury set in their original boxes.