Ella has asked us to step up to the plate and take the lead on this ‘nude debut’ series, so here goes…my first steps into naturism go as follows…

I’ve been going ‘topless’ since I was 17, when I took a girlie holiday with some friends. It was the usual drunken debauchery one expects of teens abroad, unsupervised for the first time. I wasn’t, I guess, particularly predisposed to baring all, or anything, but the crowd I was with were a bit wild. One of our group, the eldest at 19, and who’d been on foreign holidays before under similar circumstances, surprised and shocked us by bringing a different guy back each night and…well, you know…it was hard to get to sleep listening to the headboard bouncing off the wall, is all I’ll say about that.

The same girl took the lead as regards going topless, and we two-piece bikini wearing girls followed suit. It was, pretty much, the way to ‘dress’ on the beach. So ‘topless’ was the norm, topless was natural by the end of that holiday and has remained so ever since. Baring my boobs was totally unremarkable and I don’t ever recall much hesitancy or fear in doing so. Maybe the first few minutes, but when you’re in the middle of maybe 1000 people along the beach, and almost every other woman topless on it, it didn’t seem like some Rubicon to be crossed. It was more like a rite of passage on that first foreign holiday along with getting blind drunk every night, being sick on the way back to the hotel and hungover until noon. Not pretty. Indeed, once you were topless at the pool in early afternoon, having raved and raged until sun up, it was exceptionally easy to fall asleep under a parasol, oblivious as to who saw you. Nor did you care.

Fast forward a couple of years to the next girlie holiday. In Spain, again -it’s cheaper than anywhere else with guaranteed sun for we Brits to get there- and cue pretty much constant topless sunbathing. I only recollect ever putting the top on to leave the hotel’s pool complex, cross the main road to the beach, and then take it off again immediately.

As is usual on these fortnight long jaunts to the sun, you make holiday friends. Often the purpose, for both sexes, is a bit of holiday romance, and a two week sex-fest with one or a variety of partners and then the promise that you or they will write or phone. No one, as far as I’m aware, ever does.

I was maybe a little old fashioned in that ‘the one night stand‘ never interested me. I thought then, as I do now, that they’re a bit sordid, cheap and could easily come with the gift of an STI, given the amount of bodily fluid exchanges going on on the Costa del Sol or the Balearic Islands. The resort of Magaluf, for example has earned the nickname of Shagaluf, such is the propensity of Brits (and Germans and Dutch) looking for casual sex.

Yes, we were in the Balearic Islands on this holiday, but on the island of Menorca rather than Majorca/Mallorca where ‘Shagaluf’ is sited. Not quite the same wild abandon, but wild enough.

We’d been socialising with some girls from Bristol and some guys from Manchester (the girl/boy ratio was about 2:1 in our extended social group), when a couple of the lads announced they’d been to a nearby ‘nudist’ (their word, and probably mine at the time, being oblivious to the naturist lifestyle) beach. ‘We should all go tomorrow’, they said. It was fairly obvious the motivation for them was just to see naked women and, I guess at 18-19 years of age, it’s only natural.

That beach was Son Bou.

A couple of the girls were up for it. So the night went on, alcohol consumed, and the promise eventually made that we’d all go the following day. In the end, a couple of the guys and girls didn’t make it out of bed either because they were engaging in the horizontal folk dancing 🙂 or simply too hungover. Looking back, I’m not sure how I agreed to be part of the group. It didn’t seem like ‘me’ to get talked into something that I didn’t want to do. With hindsight, I feel that, sub-consciously, it was something I very much wanted to try. How embarrassing could it be? After all, we’d all been parading our t*ts around the pool for days without any shame or embarrassment.

I recall the day vividly. I remember being dressed in bikini bottoms, a pair of denim shorts over them and a singlet on top, no bra underneath, because ‘topless’ would happen. It was just accepted it would happen. We reached the beach and located the naturist part of it. Dozens upon dozens of totally naked people, which was a bit…not ‘shocking’…surprising would be a better word.

All of the girls, myself included, immediately stripped off our tops but none of us -male or female- wanted to be the one who took the lead in losing our shorts. 🙂

Cue a bit of kicking at the sand between our toes, not sure what to do next. This is where the idea that, deep down, I was anxious to try it without previously having been aware of it, comes from. Because I stood up and declared ‘if one guy and one girl joins me…I’m ready to go bare’. Some sniggering followed but one of the guys and one of the girls stood up and, almost in unison, we hauled off our shorts and ran naked towards the sea, not looking left or right, not looking at each other, just running and with gales of laughter from our peers.

If I’d thought it out, if I’d pre-planned it, I might have chosen to take my towel to give myself some sense of modesty on the return trip to where we were sat. But none of us had that foresight.

We splashed into the sea and for the next 20 minutes behaved like children, splashing water around each other, laughing, giggling and having a great time, only dimly aware (certainly dimly aware in my case) that we were naked in public. Our lead had the desired effect, however, and the remainder of the group quickly ran down the beach, all equally nude, a few minutes after us. Ten of us in the water, three guys, seven girls, all splashing around.

Eventually it was time to get out and head back to our towels. Some of the group tried their best to cover their genitals, some walked confidently, jokes were made about private parts and some wriggled back into their shorts on returning to our chosen spot while others remained contentedly bare.

Remember, this was twenty years ago, before shaving (for women and men) was as prevalent as it is now. I seem to recall that, at that time, I would have been trimming my ‘bikini line’ and I think the rest of the group would have had the same approach to depilation. Hair was most definitely ‘in’ at the time.

The entire second week of our holiday was spent at Son Bou and by the end of it I was a committed naturist, coming home to join British Naturism, subscribe to Health & Efficiency magazine and read everything I could about the lifestyle.

The following summer I was back, at Son Bou, in the company of a boyfriend I’d met at a naturist swim in London and I’ve never looked back. I holidayed mostly in Spain for several years until the Croatian Civil War ended and my then boyfriend and I opted for Koversada resort, since when I’ve been a committed Croatia-phile.

Pookes