I have serious reservations about alternative therapies, which seem like expensive unregulated snake oil to me. This makes the fact I’ve been getting acupuncture for nearly a decade, rather peculiar. On the one hand, I don’t believe in acupuncture. I can’t see how having slender pins stuck into different parts of your body, then tweaked, or perhaps twanged, can begin to have any impact on your physical or mental health; your face, skin. On the other hand, it just does. So I keep going back.
I was originally sent to see Ross Barr on a work jolly. “I don’t believe in that stuff,” I said, to the person who set it up. “Maybe not, but he’s handsome, and he does anti-aging,” they said, which is exactly the right way to get me to do absolutely anything. Off I popped.
“I don’t believe in this stuff,” I told Barr as I lay down on his couch for the first time, partly out of defence mechanism because I was a little scared, and he really was as handsome as promised.
“Good,” he said, then started feeling my wrists for my pulses, his head cocked on one side like a quizzical (handsome) dog. “Do you find yourself regularly overwhelmed by a sense of injustice?” he asked.
“Absolutely not!” I replied, choosing not to divulge details of the many furious rows I have in my head with people who’ve slighted me by queue jumping at Pret, or thanked me inadequately after I held a door open for them in a yoga studio.
“Hmmmm,” he said. He listened to my pulse some more. “Do you power through situations, regardless of how tough they are, like a stoic figure in a lashing rainstorm?”
“Um, no?” I said again.
“Hmmmmmm,” Barr said.
I knew he knew I was lying.
He started sticking pins in me, predominantly my feet and ankles. Did it hurt? Does it? Oh, not really. Acupuncture pins are terribly fine, and they don’t go very deep, though a few did pulse and fizz weirdly when Barr twisted them delicately (“Tell me when…?” he prompts, meaning, when it hurts), incommensurate zaps of sensation shoot off up and down my limbs.
Barr chatted as he worked, and swore, (which I appreciated, I love swearing;) and it all seemed to be going well, if a little randomly, when I started crying.
He squeezed my hand and told me that was normal; good, actually.
“I don’t believe in this stuff,” I wept.
“I know,” he said.
When, after forty minutes or so, he pulled the last pin back out again, and let me up, I felt slightly stoned, and about as light and sweet and cool as I had in months. I felt like I could cope better. Or - maybe not cope exactly - but like things that had worried me before I’d stepped into Barr’s treatment room, weren’t that big of a deal after all. My face, when I checked it, was the face of a woman with fewer chips, edges, anxieties, cares. It looked more open, more friendly, more chill; which is to say – prettier. Holiday face.
“I didn’t actually do anything to your face this time,” Barr explained.
I booked in with him again, because I realised it didn’t especially matter if I believed in acupuncture or not. Something good had just happened, and I wanted more.
How much does it cost?
Ross Barr works in Central London and charges £90 for an initial consultation with treatment.
Would I pay for it myself?
Well: yeah. I do. (NB The last time I went, I arrived with a stinking cold, and left without it. But I still don’t believe in acupuncture.)