Congratulations to Trine, formerly editor of this blog, who gave birth to a son a couple of weeks ago, but we’re only hearing about it now. Mother and baby are doing well (no name for the baby was mentioned in Trine’s IM to me, hopefully when she establishes a routine we’ll hear more about it all) while partner Pete* has fainted on the delivery room floor.

Actually, I made that last bit up.

Congratulations to the new family from everyone at SLN.

Ella

*the role of Pete in the photos above is played by SLN photographer Harry, and in case anyone’s asking, we set this small set of photos up months ago, before Trine went off on maternity leave, precisely for the purpose of accompanying this news. Trine was hardly likely to want to log in to relive the moment, was she? 😉

Spanish avatar Tere reports on how growing up in a relaxed atmosphere to beach clothing eventually made her a naturist

by Tere Munoz

I grew up in a village in Spain which didn’t have an official naturist beach, although there was one about 7kms away, on a bus route. But when you’re 14 a bus ride is beyond the limits of the little money you earned from doing chores, so the local beach was our playground, all summer and even good days after school. Here in Spain it’s legal to go naked if you aren’t deliberately trying to cause offence to anyone,

Tere, centre, with her friends in various types of beach wear.

The local culture was that going without a bikini top was normal, even on the local beach. When you are eight years old it is no remarkable thing. When you are 14 maybe a little more remarkable but you’ve grown up seeing your mother, aunties, grandmother maybe, and all your friends, be without a top, so it didn’t really matter.

So the beach was a top free beach for all ages. While not naturist, you would encounter people fully nude while changing all the time so that didn’t seem particularly remarkable either. People would pull off shorts to change into bikini bottoms or swim trunks. I knew what a naked man looked like before I was even old enough to process the thoughts that it was a penis.

By the time I got to 14 I had no feelings of being self-conscious. Sometimes I wore a bikini top, sometimes not. My friends did the same.

I think that the casual approach to nudity in the wider Spanish culture does lead to an acceptance of the naked body early on. At least, it does for those of us lucky to grow up on the coast. Maybe those in the interior are less free with their bodies, I don’t know.

This girl can go confidently nude amongst her topless female or clothed male friends because the culture she grew up in has given her that body confidence

Because we get long summer holidays at school in Spain, ten weeks from the end of June to the middle of September, our summer holidays were beach focused. At eight years you use the local beach. At fourteen we’d cycle to the naturist one because it was the beach for the grown ups, even though we weren’t grown ups. Locally, the summer of your fourteenth year was when the transition from local beach, filled with kids, ended and there was a rite of passage to the naturist one. We’d cycle there 3-4 times a week. I and most of my friends would have sunbathed or swum naked that summer, even if we sometimes would go back to wearing bikini panties. The guys would cycle with us, sure. We’d probably seen these guys nude when they were 7 or 8 or 9, so it didn’t make much difference to us seeing them at 14 or 16. Or us to them. We’d seen it all before. It was unremarkable.

The baby will grow up with body confidence its naturist parents taught it.

At 14 you are beginning to see the other sex in a different perspective. A guy in my class liked me, I liked him. We started dating. But I’d seen him naked lots of times before we dated, and he’d seen me naked. There was no desperate curiosity there to explore the other naked person.

Teens growing up with naturist learn respect for one another, and acceptance of the other gender.

I think this is an important lesson from the naturist culture. We grew up with a ready acceptance that boys and girls were different, knew what they looked like and didn’t feel any desperate need to tear each other’s clothes off. Naturism taught us the physiology of the opposite sex more practically than books or rude magazines. Naturism also taught us respect.

In a naturist society, we do not teach children shame about their bodies. We do not censor. This ‘learned behaviour’ will, in the future, be regarded as bad parenting.

I now have a daughter, and in the holidays I will take her to the beach, as my mother did with me. Sometimes my mother comes too. Spain is now richer, in some ways, than it was when I was growing up. Back then, we only had our bikes. Now, many more people have cars, including me, so I can drive to the naturist beach and not go to the local beach at all. There, three generations of our family can spend a day nude and it seems like a natural thing. There is no sense of shame or embarrassment. Naturism has taught us to respect our own bodies, those of other people, and to love the bodies we exist within.

Tere

(Photo captions by Ella)

Global warming. We’ve all read how it is affecting the weather. Sea levels are rising, and shifting patterns have occasionally revealed some historical treasures washed ashore. For example, some way down the Irish Sea coast from where I am, a ‘ghost ship’ emerged on Merseyside a year ago, One of Henry V’s warships was also discovered in Hampshire. Your local press may have covered some of these ‘ghost ships’ emerging during record low tides, possibly partly caused by shifting weather patterns and tides as well. Sweden is one such country where equally record low tides have revealed old wrecks.

It looks as though low tides have dislodged a well preserved galleon at Su Casa Naturist, and the members there have been active in ensuring its survival, while imaginatively utilising it as a feature on the island. Old cannons have been turned into tables, the wheel utilised as a table, and some sort of tarpaulin draped over the ship’s broken spine to make it a bit cosier and weather proofed inside.

It all looks marvellous, I have to say, and demonstrates how a sim should be run. Su Casa doesn’t change much -that is a huge tick in my boxes as there’s a slow, organic change to the place rather than constant tinkering, yet the galleon certainly freshens up the sim. A marvellous, imaginative change to Su Casa since I last dropped by, and well worthy of a visit.

Su Casa merely reflects, to some degree, RL naturism in its ‘wreck’ vista. While the ship may be from a different era, one of Romania’s naturist beaches, Costinesti, is dominated by a shipwreck, the Evangelia, and there are some conspiracy theories as to why it ran aground in 1968, possibly deliberately wrecked by its owner, Aristotle Onassis, to collect the insurance money!

On a clear day, I can see Northern Ireland from the coast here, and it seems the Evangelia was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyards over in Belfast (the same yard that built the Titanic) in 1942 under the name ‘Empire Strength’.

It certainly is a feature of a great many Romanian naturist photographs.

Hopefully, Su Casa’s latest attraction will form a backdrop to as many SL naturist photographs as the ‘Evangelia’ does to so many of Romania’s naturist photographs.

Ella