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Meeting five card-carrying members of the heavy-drinking party in a station bar could easily have been an inauspicious start to a detox weekend. The pub in Paddington station may not be the Met Bar, but it still serves booze — and therein lies the rub.

I had been asked to assemble a group of men with pub sores for an undirty weekend. No problem. But what in the name of Betty Ford can a 24-hour retreat do for five men who have spent their adult lives in retox? It seemed a classic case of shutting the stable door 20 years after the horse had bolted for the nearest boozer.

Of course, within many a toxic bachelor there is a little new-age angel trapped amid the rubble. Every bad man I called leapt at the idea of busting out of the city limits and making a break for the border. To hide out in a retreat for 24 hours with no mobile- phone reception and a whole lot of fields between the house and the nearest off-licence sounded like just what the doctor ordered. Although, as the wild bunch slunk, one at a time, into the station bar, a worrying thought did cross my mind: that we might be too late to save some of them.

The toxic quins are, to a man, stressed and hungover. All five admit to feeling flayed by the party season. Mike made the train by the skin of his teeth. As we left, he made a half-hearted lunge for the unfinished pint of Guinness on the table. "Are you familiar with the concept of muscle memory?" He asked, excusing himself. "That's what that was." If anyone needed a detox retreat, it was this lot: men for whom last orders is more often the starting bell than the sign to go home. To most of us, the word "detox" conjures up alarming images of juice-only diets and purging enemas. Luckily (for us and them), this is not what Balance Being is all about.

Arriving at Middle Stanley Farm was a relaxing experience in itself. As travellers seeking sanctuary, we were greeted at the door of the 18th- century Gloucestershire farmhouse by Clare and Rebecca Hopkins, who would be giving us treatments and caring for our party-ravaged souls for the next 24 hours.

Their business is a simple one: they care for people like us. As Balance Being (a company that the sisters founded last year), they organise destress, detox days in a loft in Clerkenwell, London, as well as country retreats such as ours, and a Sunday service where they come to your flat and sort out groups of the overpartied as they watch Sky Sports. Their philosophy is not to detox in the brutal sense, but "to restore a sense of wellbeing and harmony to hectic lives".

The next day had been mapped out in a revolving cycle of revitalising therapies, all of which were new to most of us (apart from Tall Chris, who regularly combines early-morning t'ai chi with no sleep and a hangover that would kill a small mammal). First up was a deep-tissue massage. "This may bring up deeply buried feelings," our masseuse warned us. "Don't start me crying, I'll never stop," shouted Michael. "I'm repressed for good reasons." But the only crying I did was from pleasure.

After canapés of beetroot and goat's cheese, and a dinner of salmon with sesame spinach and almond pudding, we were all realising that this detox lark might not be such a bad thing after all.

Then came the yoga nidra. Five blokes lying on the floor in a guided relaxation exercise was only ever going to end one way. By the time the session was over, the sound of snoring was reverberating through the farmhouse. And then, by mutual consent, we all had probably our earliest night since we were last tucked up and read a bedtime story.

At nine the next morning, we did an hour of t'ai chi with a local instructor, Jason Boeden. This gave Tall Chris a chance to show off and the rest of us a chance to try something new and rewarding. Over breakfast, we all agreed that we felt different: calm yet energised. And our reaction to such unaccustomed home cooking was one of gushing awe.

"It should inspire you to eat more healthily," said Rebecca, as she lapped up praise from men who usually eat food that comes on the back of a moped.

After breakfast, the toxic quins went their separate ways. For me, it was time to try reflexology: a staggeringly painful treatment that seemed simultaneously to combine the qualities of advanced torture with its polar opposite. But at the end of the hour, I felt perhaps more deeply relaxed than ever before. "You have trouble with overworked kidneys," Clare told me, "but your liver is okay." The Lord giveth and the barman taketh away.

Then I had a facial. Which was also a first. It was getting stupid now. Call it Catholic guilt, call it English repression, but by the end of the afternoon, I was starting to doubt what I had done to feel this good.

And then it was over. Back on the train, we were comatose. I felt we had started to chip away at bodies made of solid toxins. When the booze trolley came past, all five of us declined. The probability of this must be roughly akin to the chances of flipping a coin 500 times and it coming up heads every time. So something had worked. Just before we left Middle Stanley Farm, Cockney Miles started flipping idly through the Visitor's Book. There was a note in there from a 56-year-old woman who had come for a retreat last year: "A delightful break for our extended family," she wrote. "As the mist rose from the lake on Saturday morning, I, in a dazzling moment of revelatory inspiration, realised that I am a lesbian." I cannot vouch for any of us having had such an epiphany, exactly, but I do know that I expected our little group to react to the retreat with cynicism. In fact, a week later and the toxic quins are still feeling much less seasonally soiled. Next time we meet, we will raise a glass to Balance Being.