This photo wasn't taken at the Paradise Spa, but it is of some naked people in a jacuzzi, just so you get a sense of what that looks like. He's talking to Val, who's in her sixties. She's wearing a pair of bunny ears and is naked beneath her towel. Val's mate Pam β also in her sixties and dressed in a negligee with a severe Harriet Harman bowl haircut β watches the onscreen action with interest as three enthusiastic young women take it in turns to fellate a man with a limp dick and the lifeless eyes of someone who really shouldn't have taken a bunch of coke before turning up to a porn shoot.
Photo by Chris Guy via. Trying to get my bearings I wander out into the bar fully dressed. George looks me up and down and shakes his head. A quick change later, and Big George shows me round. There is a sauna, steam room and two jacuzzis, along with a number of themed "couples rooms" β private spaces with red female silhouettes painted on the doors, containing double beds with thin plastic mattresses. The place is filling up now, the crowd predominantly composed of middle-aged geezers and their wives, with a few younger swingers in their twenties rounding everything out.
One guy, a cabbie from Romford with a Comic Book Guy ponytail, marshals his wife, a harried, emaciated-looking woman in black lingerie beneath a long shocking-pink string vest, towards one of the bedrooms.
He shrugs. You've just got to talk to them a bit. Get 'em frisky, like. Big George continues the tour, leading me through the bar, where colourful vodka jellies are lined up, to a tiny dance floor. Here, two large girls in bunny ears and see-through Ann Summers nighties spin round stripper poles. Pitbull bellows through Kesha's "Timber", played off a laptop by the DJ, a guy in his sixties who looks as though he'd be more comfortable spinning Val Doonican at the local dominoes club.
With glittery tassels hanging on the walls, fake plastic flowers, fairy lights and complimentary peanuts, crisps and Flumps on offer at the bar β plus the sense that many of the people here are regulars β the atmosphere is more akin to an Essex knees-up than an orgy. This impression is reinforced when the DJ drops Chas n' Dave's "Rabbit" to the obvious delight of everyone there. My tour complete, Big George shakes my hand and wishes me luck. I head to the sauna, where I find Val and Pam.
