I used to spend a blissful hour, or so, one evening a month relaxing in a floatation chamber. There is something deeply soothing, strange as it may seem, about gently floating in a warm solution of Epsom salts. You know that old truism about just letting go ? That was the shape of things for me every time I floated; all senses rested and the stress clock, if not discarded for good, then certainly reset back to zero. Someone once wrote in the floatation centre comments book that they slunk in as a frump and left as a Goddess. I knew all about that. Happened every time, a slow, invisible transformation back from London stress-head to a more engaged sense of being human, mentally, physically, and most definitely emotionally.

Another testimonial from a fellow floater said that: "...in our busy world it is good to have a place to come, turn the light off and tap into the side of your brain that wants to play and have fun..." So true. Work and daily life is very left hemisphere (that part of the neo-cortex where all the processing happens, the analytical centre). It's noisy, chattering away, busily reacting to external stimuli. Put it this way: it's the bossy, over-bearing sibling. Well-intentioned, but just...well, loud. Unlike the quieter right hemisphere, the wall-flower of the pair. But wall-flowers are n't timid, no, I think of them as reflective, deep, intuitive, sensory, capable of synthesising vast amounts of ideas and notions, which is the way I visualise the right hemisphere. It's the brain's creative crucible. A spell of floating invariably got me thinking in some very lateral, non linear ways, an awful lot of creative breakthroughs happened during or just afterwards.

End of an era. After notching up two year's worth of floats, I decided to stop last year, and I still truthfully don't know why, money maybe, the fact of having to travel there possibly, I don't really know, just that I did. It never dropped of the radar, it was always on the "I'm going back to do again" list; and I did spread the floating word to a few friends who went themselves, so clearly not an irrevocable decision. I would have returned. Except I can't; I found out yesterday they're closing.

Is it a first indicator of the sub-prime induced storm coming on-shore, people reining in discretionary spending. Argue amongst yourselves, I don't know, although the stated reason for closing is, and I admire the owner for his absolute candour in saying this, is a critical shortage of cash. It's more common, or at least it seems to me it is, for someone to use the smokescreen of a planned refurbishment, and simply close the doors and never come back. There's an organic cafe in Chiswick that's had the refurbishment starting next week sign glued on it's windows for months.

What does matter is that West London has lost not just one of things that gives it a quirky, bohemian charm, it's that there a precious few places remaining now where you can bask in utter solitude, and return to a hectic, mad-cap world, rested, relaxed and recharged.