A rendezvous with destiny

Gianluca and I mounted the steps to the Friedrichsbad in Baden-Baden, Germany, in pensive silence. We hadn’t made eye contact since we’d met in reception at our hotel, the divine Brenners, for this rendezvous with destiny. At the front desk, we were sternly reminded of the dress code. We nodded. For the next three hours we were going to be stark naked in a 19th-century, Renaissance-themed, domed and frescoed temple to the God of Thermal Springs, adorned with hand-painted majolica tiles, statuary and a sequence of pools and chambers. “Kein Textil,” the woman repeated.

After removing every stitch, we processed to the shower room – me checking that the area, equipped with vast ceiling-mounted bronze fittings, had several exits – wearing only blue plastic slippers. Gianluca had left his spectacles behind. “Probably a good thing,” I said, as I wrenched a lever for my regulation three-minute drenching. My towel was already soaked so I abandoned it in a hammam where men lolled on stone benches, legs apart. Gianluca and I sat in silence on a raised dais, snuffing the sulfurous airs and glancing at fellow bathers as if this was the most natural thing in the world.

We are like babies who have returned, in advanced middle-age, to the blissful ataraxy of our mothers’ wombs

In my head, I had entered a rhapsodic state already. “This is marvelous,” I was thinking. “When in Baden-Baden, you should definitely go to the Bad, not that modern one next door, the Caracalla, where you’re allowed swimwear, but here, this is the echt Bad,” I was telling myself, pitying the others who’d chosen to go to the super-deluxe spa and pool at the Brenners and how they’d all wish they’d been to this proper old one by the ruins of the Roman baths. For the next hour we moved silently between numbered pools and chambers designed to warm and cool the body with air and water and purify the mind. I had entered a fugue state. It was clear to me now. The reason you or I can be as naked as a Lucian Freud is that this is the one place you would never announce, “But don’t you know who I am?” – it only works if nobody knows who you are. We are all equal, and equally human! This is helped by nobody talking. Being naked while simmering in waters spouted onto the earth’s surface by artesian pressure from 12 springs containing sodium chloride, from a depth of 2,000 meters – waters that reach a temperature of up to 155°F – cannot be improved by small talk of any kind.

Gianluca and I were lolling in a pool underneath a cinnamon-painted dome. This is one of the only times, I was thinking, where we can bask in an amniotic bubble as if we are babies who have returned, in advanced middle-age, to the blissful ataraxy of our mothers’ wombs, all our needs and wants provided for by this warm immersion, cares washed away.

Without his spectacles, Gianluca couldn’t see where we should go next – there were so many options. He turned to a man he assumed was a regular, standing at one end of the pool we were in. He was wearing glasses. He looked at home. Unfortunately, he turned out to be Scottish. “I’ll show ye,” he said eagerly, hauling himself out. We had no choice but to follow his buttocks into a room where you bobbed in shallow water on slabs, like beached whales. Look, I didn’t mind showing my front bottom to any number of naked Germans. Given a choice they’d be naked all the time. But I found I minded someone from Auld Reekie asking out loud in front of half of the Black Forest (no pun intended), “Are you Rachel Johnson?” And then saying he knew it was me, confiding “it’s your hair” and so on, breaking the fourth wall and whipping away my invisibility cloak at the same time.

As we lay with our herbal teas on daybeds afterwards, Gianluca apologized, but I was over it already, and asking him how it was for him. Was there a vibe? I mean, were men checking each other out? I couldn’t tell as I am not a gay man, you see. “Within seconds,” he said, and then explained about the various men, “the skinny one in the corner” and “that fat blond one with the button mushroom,” the looks exchanged and how only gay men sat like that, legs akimbo.

As we left, pink, clean and moisturized with mineral lotions, the fat blond one with the button mushroom turned out to be from Newcastle, England. I know this because as we exited, he followed us out of the changing room, and suggested we went “for a few beers.” Reader, we made our excuses and left the Geordie with the chode (don’t ask me to explain) on the steps of the Friedrichsbad.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.