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.
