*sigh*

I’m back after a quite unexpected trip away. The reason being that the RL Mr. Pookes (a phrase borrowed from Ella, and her RL man) popped the question…ooh….about a month ago! 🙂

Now, let me explain. The RL Mr. Pookes and I have been an item for about ten years. We met at university, at the St. Valentine’s Ball. And no, it wasn’t as romantic as it sounds. I drank too much, was sick and must have looked a total mess when he pulled me out of a flower bed and insissted on taking me home.

OK girls…this is the moment where alarm bells, drunk or not, should go off. And I was away past the point of caring, it shames me to say. But I got lucky. Mr. Pookes carted me off home, dumped me on a sofa (which I was sick on) and was gentlemanly enough to let himself out and go home alone. Most men wouldn’t, they’d have taken advantage.

And then called the next day to see if I was OK.

Apart from the hangover…yeah.

What happened next was that I invited him out for dinner, more by way of saying ‘thanks’ than anything else. I didn’t, initially, fancy him or anything. He seemed a bit…geeky! (I know that’s now a cool thing to be, back then it wasn’t. But maybe it was his geekiness that stopped him taking advantage). He wasn’t, I suppose, a ‘hunk’, but my goodness, when you socialised with him, he was hard not to love. A personality for which the word ‘magnetic’ was probably coined. One thing led to another…we dated again, became an item and moved in together about eight years ago. And we’ve been ‘living in sin’, to coin a phrase, ever since! 🙂

So, on St. Valentine’s Day, he popped the question, went down on one knee, gave me a ring and some tickets for a ‘holiday’ in Greece, at a naturist location.

A group nude wedding at the Hedonism resort in Jamaica (more realistically, this was probably more of a renewal of vows than it was first time out for most of these couples)

To cut a long story short, we went out there, were ‘married’ in a naturist wedding ceremony on the beach (outside our favourite beach bar) surrounded by some of our naturist friends in Greece and from England. And while I’m not one for making a crossover between SL & RL, I even invited Ella. (This is true. Like Pookes, I don’t cross-fertilise RL & SL, but I’d have loved to have attended were it not for the short notice and pressure of work. That said, Pookes and I are meeting up in RL later this year: Ella)

One of our friends, who has an online degree to be a pastor in an American church, ‘married’ us, and then we came home to make it official and legal with the authorities in the UK. 🙂

So there we are. I’m now Mrs. Pookes. It doesn’t feel that much different to being Miss Pookes, since we have actually lived together for the best part of a decade, and the ring(s) -engagement to wedding in the space of a week- still look strange on my finger, but I’m really pleased that he’s managed to survive me for a decade without a) killing me and b) caring enough to make a commitment. I know he won’t be reading this -he doesn’t do SL- but ‘I love ya, ya big geek! 🙂

I now need someone to act as a stand-in while we do our SL vows…and get a few pix of our SL nuptials (well, me and a stand-in). I could make jokes about us, me, him all night, but the fact is that he’s been the best thing in my life for a good part of my adult life. I’ll try and get round to doing a few sham ‘naturist wedding’ shots for SLN soon (is there a naturist wedding chapel in SL?), as the RL Mr. Pookes doesn’t do SL.

(Mrs) Pookes 🙂

I see this all the time in Spain. A family (at least, part of a family) turn up on the beach in mid-late afternoon. Very often it’s a mother & daughter combo, and the daughter could be between 16-40 years of age, the mother’s age 20+ years in advance of that. And they then spend part of the afternoon swimming or sunbathing. Most often, they’ll arrive in swimwear, and most often the daughter, in keeping with her generation, will readily accept some form of nudity is part of the beach deal. If it’s not a ‘nude’ beach, being topless will still be a core part of Spanish beach life. No one blinks an eyelid at a pair of bared breasts, anywhere.

The daughter will very readily go topless immediately.

Often, ‘momma’ keeps her swimsuit on, but there are no disapproving looks regarding her daughter’s, at the very least, semi-nudity. Momma will not see her as a ‘puta‘ -a whore- for readily going nude, or semi-nude. It’s widely accepted as part of beach life, a normal dress code.

Often, the daughter will go fully nude if it’s a naturist beach, clothing discarded before Momma can get a beach towel laid out.

By contrast, a father/son, or even father/daughter combination is rare. It seems that, in Spanish beach life, a mother and daughter use this time as family bonding time. Perhaps Dad and brother have gone to watch a football match.

Indeed, a father & son combination is likely to be only visible where the whole family take to the beach. Sunday afternoons are exceptionally popular for this in Spain, and I’ve often seen three generations of family, granny, her son or daughter, their spouse and her grandchildren all on the beach together.

However, toplessness in a more mature generation is also fairly commonplace, and Momma may indeed shed her bikini top (or toll down her one-piece suit), to enjoy a fuller tan. The practice of semi-nudity, and beyond, has been going on so long that it is often a mother who has led the way for her daughter in this regard. My friend Mercedes, whom I’ll be seeking to interview about historical Spanish naturism when I’m out there in the summer, says that she was readily encouraged, but never forced, into going topless as a teen. ‘I don’t wish to make it seem like I was bullied into it’, she laughs, ‘but when I reached puberty I wanted to cover up my body, despite having previously happily run around the beach naked. My mother said nothing…it was a case of ‘whatever you want to do’, and then eventually, maybe 17 or so, I started going topless again, because my mother’s acceptance of it made it all seem normal!’*

Occasionally, even the older generation will embrace full nudity. It’s not ‘rare’ as an occurrence, just perhaps marginally less commonplace. Indeed, I’ve often witnessed situations where grandma is on after-school childcare duties, and so she and her grandchildren hit the beach, strip off and play games….tag, football, volleyball, on ad-hoc courts, until it’s time to be collected by one or other parent.

My thanks to the unrelated Judy (younger model) and Nancy (older model) for playing the roles of mother and daughter in the shots above. Photos by Harry. *Mercedes’ words aren’t an exact quote, but a paraphrasing of a previous real life conversation we’ve previously had.

Ella

There’s no real story to these photos. It’s just a couple of shots I took of a model at a regularly stunning Fotoscope sim, a haven for photographers.

Diane