Photograph: Tim Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Since my first swimming lessons last year, I’ve made progress. Last week, I went for a country river swim, complete with frozen toes, refreshed lungs and floating condom wrappers.
But there are challenges, even with indoor dips: the waterlogged ears, the lane-swimming custom of tapping someone’s foot if they are too slow (what is the message here? Please stop so I can pass? Please drown, for the sake of my PB?). And, biggest of all, changing-room nudity.
My locker room approach goes like this: a towel is wrapped around my bottom half in the manner of a hunky man in a shaving ad before everything under it is removed quickly, with a prayer that the towel won’t fall. Any bra-to-bikini action takes place in the narrow space under a T-shirt. Sometimes, if the towel is big enough, I might throw the whole thing over my head – a costume ghost in a shy and haunting striptease.
I see other, often older, women naked and at ease in the communal spaces. Where, I wonder, could I have learned to be comfortably nude? I couldn’t have done much worse than a British Asian upbringing: in maths, this would be expressed as “prude squared”.
However, I may not be alone. An article that did the rounds some years ago pointed to (male) millennials’ preference for private locker rooms. Perhaps technology is the culprit: our digital upbringing has pulverised our expectation of privacy and the hope that people won’t gawk (or take pictures).
Sad, really, that a rare sighting of skin without shame might fully disappear. I am trying it, slowly. A nipple here, a bum cheek there. A sign in my leisure centre reads “no excessive nudity”. But perhaps a small amount is what we all need.
