I want you just to take a minute.

Close your eyes and picture this scene. (Except don’t close your eyes, because then you won’t be able to read.)

You’re lying face down in a warm and sweet-smelling room. The children are miles away (in safe hands, not just abandoned at a motorway service station), and you’ve spent the day relaxing, reading your favourite book, taking the odd dip in the hydrotherapy pool and being brought cups of tea. Later on you’ll be enjoying a wonderful meal, and right now you are being massaged by a man with the looks of David Beckham, the wit of Stephen Fry and the credit card limit of Bill Gates.

All this could be yours.*

"win a spa break"If you’re in desperate need of a time out, then you need to pop along right now and enter the Four Pillars Hotels competition to win a weekend spa break for two – a whole two days and two nights of pampering, including dinner, treatments and, in my opinion the best bit of staying in a hotel – breakfast. I don’t know what it is about the breakfast, but somehow it feels really special. I think it’s the toast racks and the tiny jars of jam.

Enter now for your chance to indulge in the delights of miniature jams. And the spa obviously. Don’t forget that.

*Apart from the quality of the masseur. I absolutely cannot promise that.

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