Super, smashing, great.

Jim Bowen has always had the capacity, for me anyway, to promote feelings of wellbeing and contentment. Until recently though, I'd no idea a whole industry had built up around it.

Explanation, I suspect, is required.

Being a sufferer from both joint and back pain - the former mostly self-inflicted, sporting injuries from which arthritic complaints will most surely follow - I'd gladly go to some lengths to alleviate the symptoms. In the past I've visited both chiropracters and osteopaths to have a go at sorting out the troublesome lumbar regions, the original cause of which long since escapes me. As for the joints - knackered shoulder, wrecked knee, dodgy ankles - I've done little other than irregularly consume glucosamine tablets and powders. Hey, it's got bits of shark bone in it to aid flexibility...and for some reason it seems to improve the cello-playing no end...

I'd heard of the Bowen technique a few months ago and had investigated it a wee bit (okay, I'd read the leaflet and nodded, uhmmed and ahhed when the lady in the therapy centre had explained it to me) but hadn't thought any more about it. Until now. At the weekend I was given a treatment, about 40minutes worth, in the comfort of my own home by a very nice lady who - in a very relaxed, relaxING, non-invasive and calm way - manipulated, or "nudged" as I believe the Bowen practitioners say, my back, shoulders and legs in short bursts (though bursts perhaps suggests speed and vigour, neither of which are qualities I'd associate with this experience) of activity, leaving the room for a few minutes in between each "move" to give my body time to make sense of what was happening. It was lovely. Very serene and calming.

At the risk of coming over all new-age here, I felt towards the end of the treatment as though I was levitating (though I must confess to having no levitatory yardstick on which to base this, so I may simply have been having an out-of-body experience, yeah, that would explain it...) and by the time it was all over I was ready to nod off.Thoroughly recommended. Post surgery as I am, even my dodgy knee seems to feel a wee bit more mobile and that can only be a good thing.

Now, where's that prize-board...?