The Naked Strokie

There are a million and one ways in which being a stroke-survivor affects your daily life. In my case, they range from the apparently trivial (don’t eat Full English breakfasts) to the much more serious (having to walk with a stick, because my balance is so uncertain, or stroke fatigue which can floor me for days). By far the most serious, of course, was the termination of my working life at the age of 49. Retraining was not an option because of the memory loss and cognitive problems, so I was retired and had to take the company pension I had built up from a previous employer, while turning to the benefits system to help keep Warrillow Towers over our heads. How has this affected my naturism? Well, it’s often said that naturism is an activity for the relatively well-off. There are club fees to pay, caravan and camping costs to account for and no-one involved in the naturist business has ever denied to me that there is a premium put on the price of naturist holidays, which peopl...

I had a conversation earlier this week with a female naturist friend about body-image issues. About those people who think they would like to try naturism but won't because ''I haven't got the right body for it." Of course, this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to encouraging new people into naturism. Not everyone has the relaxed attitude to their body-image that I have had for my whole life - or that my  friend has - and not everyone is as comfortable with the way their body changes as they get older,  something I discussed in my last post. It takes a certain amount of courage and self-belief to be comfortable with your naked body. As my friend said: "I chose to be happy in my own skin. Are there things I would like to change? Sure! Most people have things they would like to change and that's OK. There is no such thing as the perfect body and we should all be doing what makes us feel good, inside and out. "Neighbours can be a problem if t...

Are you one of those people who has always felt that in order to look sexy or be desired, you had to have your hair properly done, be shaved in all the right places and (depending on gender....) have to be wearing the right amount of aftershave or have a full face of make-up on? Well, thankfully, as someone who has been comfortable as a naturist for my whole life, the above doesn't apply to me. But it does for too many people, especially young people. And I'm happy to say that a good friend of mine, Rebecca Lowrie of self-alchemy.com, addressed this in a recent social media post. She said that she used to have that attitude. But after many years of learning to love and accept herself, she now knows differently. In her post, she included a picture of herself without make-up, with her hair up and the word SEXY on the wall behind her. She encouraged her readers to look in a mirror, right now, as they were and say to themselves that they are gorgeous, sexy and desirable RIGHT...

It's been a while since I last blogged about naturism - just under a couple of months, in fact. My last offering was entitled: "Will anyone take a naked leap of faith?" It was about the scope which exists for businesses to expand into naturism if their owners are willing to take that step into the unknown and embrace what one influential figure in the naturist community used to call 'the buff pound.' And as it happens, the last two months in the UK have provided near-perfect weather for anyone who wanted to take that naked leap of faith and try nude living for themselves. The temperatures have been in the high-70s or low-80s on most days, the Sun has shone down from cloudless skies on most days; it's almost as if we're having a proper summer such as 1976 (when I was 12 years old) or 1990 when Mrs Naked Strokie and I got married (in clothes!) and the mercury hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit as we left the church on a lovely sunny Saturday afternoon in late-Jul...

For the first time this year, I can sit here writing my Naked Strokie blog, well, naked. The weather has taken a turn for the better and it's warm enough to sit in my kitchen crafting these words without wearing any clothes. The kitchen door  is open, I have a sarong handy in case of unexpected visitors, the sun is shining bright through the kitchen window. It somehow feels right to be naked. So why wouldn't you? I was in Norfolk last week, not too many miles from where my wife and I spent some of the most idyllic summer holidays of our 30 years together. We stopped every July at a naturist campsite in several acres of woodland just to the west of Norwich. It was owned by a farmer who had been struggling to make ends meet and decided to put some spare fields on the edge of his land to good use. He and his wife and some friends had enjoyed several summer holidays at naturist sites in the south of France and, taking  something of a leap of faith, he wondered whether there ...

'Being nude in public doesn't necessarily mean exposing your bare skin.' Now that statement may not seem rational - of course being nude means exposing your skin, surely? But the important word in my opening quote was 'bare'. Because nude bodypainting is becoming increasingly popular; the skill of taking a naked human body and painting on it intricate designs. One of the most fun nights of my life was spent a few years ago at a big naturist event where I hosted a quiz night in front of about 300 naked people, painted as a tiger. I still have pictures of the event somewhere. A pretty convincing tiger I made, too. The artist spent most of the afternoon painting me in yellow and black stripes of differing lengths and by the time the pre-event photographs were taken (in which I struck a suitably scary pose), I was quite proud of how I looked. The body paint stayed intact throughout the evening and beyond. Indeed, the downside was how difficult it proved to wash of...