"The disposable underwear is optional," said the middle-aged blonde female who had overseen my induction.
   "Pardon?" I said, but she was gone, leaving me with a towelling robe in one hand and what appeared to be some sort of bathing cap in the other.

What, I wondered, holding the triangle of cloth with two attendant loops aloft, was I supposed to do with this?

I like milk. Milk in my tea, milk in my muesli. I'm partial to milk, but I've never yearned to bathe in it.

This, however, was no ordinary milk, as the woman operating the spa at the Shoal Bay Resort had been at pains to point out. I checked the brochure and she was right. It wasn't ordinary milk. It was Tasmanian milk.

The spa thing, as you might have noticed, is now an essential element of any weekend retreat. If you haven't been rubbed, tugged, waxed, wrapped or exfoliated in the past month then quite frankly, dear reader, you should begin to question your social relevance.

How I came to be standing in the changing rooms of the Shoal Bay Resort north of Sydney, holding a towelling robe and a bathing cap and/or pair of disposable underdaks, is not important. (I have a highly persuasive girlfriend.)

What matters is that I was there and there was no turning back. I would have preferred a massage but the Nordic goddess who had handed me the robe didn't look like the sort of person with whom you argued.

Looking around to ensure I was alone, I pulled it over my head. Nope. It definitely wasn't a bathing cap.

That left one option and checking again to ensure that no one had entered the room unseen, I undressed and put on what could only have been a pair of disposable undies.

"They've got to be kidding," I thought as I looked at my reflection in the mirror, revealing a medium height, slightly underfed male with a thin strip of dental floss bisecting his private bits.

"Perhaps I've got them on back to front," I thought...so I reversed them.

"Holy crap!" I gasped, looking at the mirror which showed the same male but whose groin was now covered by what appeared to be a shower cap designed to fit an African elephant.

"There must be some awfully big boys in Shoal Bay," I thought as I pulled out the waist band and peered down into the space which, apart from my modestly proportioned appendage, could easily have accommodated several watermelons. It could, in fact, have held an entire fruit basket.

"I can't wear these," I moaned. I wasn't, in any case, wearing them, being more out of them than in.

No daks, I decided, were better than a cross between a G-string and a shower cap, so I pulled on my robe and headed for what was referred to, rather mysteriously, as "the treatment room".

It was dark in the treatment room but I could make out a large bath filled with a white liquid on a raised platform. Tasmanian milk! How many Taswegian cows, I wondered, had given of their all to fill my bath? The female attendant who had shown me in looked at me and I looked at her.

Obviously, I had to lose the robe but the disposable underdaks were in the robe pocket and not sheathing my loins. Perhaps there was something in my expression which alerted her to the imminence of what for her would be an unpleasant experience for she suddenly became quite nervous.

"I'll leave you to get in the bath," she blurted and dashed from the room.

I slipped into the bath and eased into its contours. "Hmmmmm. How comfortable," I thought, wondering how many litre containers of milk I'd have to buy from Woolies to fill the tub at home.

Seconds later, the bath began to pulsate, nozzles pumping streams of milk at my neck, chest, legs and the soles of my feet as the bath began to froth and foam. The foam grew and grew, cascading over the sides and on to the floor. I could no longer rest my head without disappearing beneath a layer of foam.

I had a sudden vision of a headline: "Man Drowns In Vibrating Milk Shake!"

After an eternity, the pulsating ceased and a voice echoed in the darkness. "I'll get your robe," said the blonde lady, holding it in front of her as you would a crucifix to a vampire and using it to shield her face from the foam-flecked visage emerging from the bath.

   "How do you feel?" she asked.
   "Milked," I said.

I dressed and went for a cup of tea in the cafe with my overly-relaxed girlfriend (Exactly what did she get up to in those massage rooms???), wondering as we waited to be served what they did with all that milk. Recycled it, perhaps?