We should begin the new year with a little idea I’ve had cooking up for some time. I couldn’t quite believe the synchronicity of this when I researched it! 🙂

Firstly, please read the following…

In the United Kingdom, the first nudist club was established in Wickford, Essex in 1924. According to Michael Farrar, writing for British Naturism the club adopted the name “Moonella Group” from the name of the owner of the ground, Moonella, and called its site The Camp. Moonella, who was still living in 1965 but whose identity remains to be discovered, had inherited a house with land in 1923 and made it available to certain members of the New Gymnosophy Society. This society had been founded a few years before by H.C. Booth, M.H. Sorensen and Rex Wellbye under the name of the English Gymnosophical Society. It met for discussions at the Minerva Cafe at 144 High Holborn in London, the headquarters of the Women’s Freedom League. Those who were permitted to join the Moonella Group were carefully selected, and the club was run by an “aristocracy” of the original members, all of whom had “club names” to preserve their anonymity. The club closed in 1926 because of building on adjacent land. (from Wikipedia)

Could you make this stuff up?

I take a keen interest in naturist history and its origins, and I do know that the ‘anonymity’ of the early pioneers of UK naturism was carefully protected, with members adopting quasi-classical names for their membership of clubs. It would have been possible for you, ‘Diomedes’ to be sitting alongside ‘Mr and Mrs Polydius’, for example. You would never have learned that they were Mr and Mrs John Smith to your Jim Brown.

It’s with great delight that I discovered the above fact about the UK’s naturist origins, for obvious naming reasons. And, well, the group’s ‘insignia’/logo seems obvious…Ella mooning! 🙂 (Bare bottomed, anyway). I do like the starry night sky above me!

You can search for, and join, the Moonella Group free in world, and I’ve also added a page to the blog to record Moonella activities.

Let me tell you what I intend Moonella to be.

Moonella will function as a group, through which I shall be sending out Group Notices (and the occasional, naturist related ‘freebie’) to inform you -instantaneously- of any naturist activities forthcoming in SL. It is not, at this stage anyway, intended to be any sort of ‘landed’ club, that is, we won’t be taking on a sim and running it as a naturist location in SL. There are already several excellent naturist locations in SL, with new ones appearing and old ones disappearing, all the time. I’m not in competition with them. I belong to several, and will continue to enjoy their facilities and report from all without favour. The SLN is intended to be an outlet and a voice for SL’s naturist community, and please remember that it’s also your paper, and if you’ve anything to say about any naturist activities within SL (or even in the real world)  you are more than welcome to comment and contribute. The only likelihood of me taking on any sort of ‘landed’ capacity and running a naturist sim of my own is if all of the others suddenly decided to pack it all in. That’s unlikely. I think it’s evident there’s a thriving naturist community within SL, even if many people are only virtual naturists. By the promotion of the lifestyle as wholesome and healthy within SL, I always hope that participants may just decided to embrace the lifestyle in the real world.

One other development for 2013 will be that we’re adding another page, ‘Naturists in the News’, and the expectation here is that we’ll report real life naturist events, happenings and so on and reflect them within SL. We’ve already done that to some degree over the past year, but we’ll kind of formalise that with that page. I’ll also be looking, after a full year of publication, at which pages work and which don’t. The ‘Mr and Miss SL Naturist’ page doesn’t really work for me, so I intend to discontinue that, regardless that a previous attempt to discontinue met with some opposition 🙂 I won’t take the page down, but may shift the contents into an ‘archive’ or ‘mothballed’ section.

I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and a peaceful New year.

Ella