"Ohh you lucky thing, another treatment!" less pampered friends coo at me as I explain I am off for a facial/floatation tank/massage/psycho-drama therapy/Shamanic Trance Dance classes.

Many of these friends work at the grubby coalface of news - reporting on what's going on out there in the world, with all its misery and its majesty.

But I on the other hand am as far from the coalface as its possible to get. This morning's assignment saw me lathered in essential oils, with some sort of cool goo on my eyes murmuring, "Yes, that pressure's fine thanks."

While fellow CNN reporters are in war zones or at least in press conferences, I could be found this morning in the chill-out room of the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge in a cream robe, lying on a chaise lounge, reading a copy of Tatler and eating grapes.

"Don't hate me too much!" I tell my worn-out, unpampered friends. "My job has its hazards and its heartaches!"

The chief hazard and heartache is that I feel peculiarly blurry all the time - as if I am some sort of smudge. Like now - I am at work but I don't really feel present, I'm not quite sure that I'm real.

Maybe its a side effect of all the essential oils that have seeped into my skin. Maybe I have been rubbed so much by masseurs that they have rubbed me out. I have been exfoliated to such an extent that my very borders are on the back of some scouring pad somewhere in Knightsbridge awaiting the furnace. Oh no - not the furnace!

The heavy robe is but a cage, the grapes are but the Grapes of Wrath.....I am in the words of T.S Eliot: "Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;" or at least this is what I tell my friends who envy my spa treatments. Don't! I say. I am a smudge.

Labels: CNN, Mandarin Oriental, massage, smudge