‘I began to feel like I was dissolving into mist’: The Mere spa, Knutsford, infiltrated

I’m a 31-year-old single journalist who lives in a shared house and can make four meals out of a bag of pasta. 

My weekly budget amounts to a combination of eye-watering train tickets, Amber Leaf and Guinness on the weekends, and I haven’t splurged a potential house deposit on daily oat milk lattes and Pret paninis, as some tedious old duffers would have you believe. 

Maybe in some utopian future this can be all of us - a four day week with Monday as state-sanctioned spa day

All in all, there’s laughably little room in my budget for something like a membership to the Mere Resort and Spa in Knutsford, an area where it saves time to simply count the houses that aren’t worth over a million. 

So when I was offered a guest pass for an afternoon in the resort spa, the opportunity to live like I hadn’t chosen an English Literature degree was too tempting to pass up.

We arrived on Monday afternoon, driving past the sign warning of errant golf balls and parking up outside the spa before walking inside to the reception desk.

I would imagine spa receptions are deliberately designed and managed in a way that makes you feel like you’re entering a sort of hinterland - somewhere between the world of schedules and traffic and travel updates and the kind of netherworld you drift into just before sleep.

The staff act as a sort of ferryman for this journey, human and welcoming but with a vaguely android quality, the difference being that when a polite member of staff says ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that’ you don’t start to fear for your life.

I was handed two towels (two!) and pointed towards the men’s changing rooms. I walked in and was greeted almost immediately by the sight of a middle-aged man’s bare arse. When dealbreakers and captains of industry talk about ‘the inner sanctum’ I’m not sure that’s what they had in mind.

There’s an array of saunas and steam rooms within the changing room, and I went into the aroma steam room, which was empty and positively ponged of lavender. It was a nice scent to be effectively napalmed in.

In any other instance, pouring in sweat is up there with one of life’s more unpleasant sensations, but in a sauna for some reason this isn’t the case. Sometimes I guess you’ve just got to relax and let the air pull Sunday’s red wine from your pores.

Two men walked in and engaged in some classic ‘sauna chat’; from ‘It’s hot in here’ to gossip about the change of ownership and discussing which golf courses are on the slide. This is the stuff people imagine men talk about in saunas, so it was nice to see it confirmed out in the wild.

I went next door into the sauna proper (wood panelled, grey coals and a bucket of cold water) and sat for about as long as I could handle, watching the temperature dial teeter into the 90s before the pool beckoned.

The pool was perhaps busier than you’d expect, or at least the loungers were. The room (clean, quiet, inviting) had the sense of something you might find extended onto the first moon hotel; very Tranquillity Base.

Most mornings I wake up contorted and cribbed like a bottled spider, so a large hydrotherapy pool to unravel in definitely had me hooked on the bubbles. I then tried out the adjacent ‘Thermal Zone’, consisting of a sauna, salt room, steam room and a caldarium.

The sauna and steam room were much like the ones mentioned above, but the salt room is a fun addition. There was a block of amber brown salt on the side that had me slightly baffled. Is it decorative? Do I use it like a bar of soap?

Much like the suggested order of rooms (hot then cold, or the reverse? Or both?), it can feel like the rejuvenative equivalent of dinner party cutlery etiquette. I guess you would get used to it in time.

All of this does beg the question: who on earth is free on a Monday afternoon, whiling away the hours to the sound of faintly Japanese pan pipes and jacuzzi jets?

One answer would be middle aged men with paunches and even paunchier watches. They and the greying old gents know how to enjoy the time given to them, probably because I’d imagine they’ve spent the last forty years on the M6, or on flights to Frankfurt or chained to a desk phone.

The young men, however, looked faintly lost and purposeless, not quite knowing how to do nothing. 

This is something I can sympathise with. While I can certainly see how you could spend all day here, after two hours I began to feel like I was dissolving into mist. 

Maybe in some utopian future this can be all of us - a four day week with Monday as state-sanctioned spa day. Unfortunately, with things as they appear to be going, I think there’s more likelihood of me spending Mondays mining salt rather than rubbing it on my skin.

Ultimately the Mere spa is very lovely, and at £108 a month for annual membership is a steal for someone with a stonking salary. I guess I could kick to the curb the daily commute (£120 per month) and walk the nearly three hours to the city centre every day, but I imagine it would produce levels of stress even the Mere would struggle to undo.

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