If you haven’t tried the wholesome and healthy world of naturism, it’ll be difficult for me to explain what’s so great about it.

If the appeal isn’t immediately obvious i totally get that; it’s a bit like how I feel about yoga; slowly changing positions on a plastic mat with a roomful of po-faced strangers looks so goofy that i find it difficult to believe that there could be anything profound or rewarding about it. And I once felt a similar way about nudism myself – how could such an irrelevant factor as the absence of fabric make such a difference?

Well, it just does. Maybe it’s sensory, maybe it’s spiritual, I don’t know – it’s just great. You’ll hear people babble on about liberation and freedom, and these are cliche, but this might be for a reason – it might just be something people always say because it’s true.

The wind-chime and joss-stick aspect is only half the story. For me at least, in the UK, nudity is almost exclusively something that happens for a couple of minutes in the shower each morning, or in an exclusively sexual context. It means that we are forced to think of our bodies as shameful, secret, dangerous and our nakedness as only having a practical or sexual purpose.

Entirely non-sexual nudity like the simple nakedness you’ll find at a naturist swim (the least “sexy” environment you could imagine and counter-intuitively just as often conservative as it is liberal in terms of the people attending) de-weaponizes your physical form, and makes it neutral again. In this way, it stops being just something you break out under cover of night, a dirty secret you share only with people you intend to have sex with. It’s just you in your most natural and simple form.

There’s no status or hierarchy among the naked, no real way to tell where people are from, what they earn, or what they do. The only way to get any meaningful kind of idea of what that person is like is to walk up to them and start a conversation to find out.

I find that level of truth and simplicity freeing, and, uh.. yeah, liberating.

If it’s something you want to try, and it’s legal and appropriate to do so, give it a whirl.

But Where? Our European cousins have it covered (or, perhaps more accurately, uncovered) and there are literally thousands of opportunities throughout the continent. Looking online however, you’ll mostly find suggestions of beaches as though that’s all there is to do but actually, there are some amazing places that you may not have thought of.

Here follow three of my favourites;

Ribersborgs Bathhouse – Malmö Sweden.

Perhaps the most wholesome and unambiguously healthy nude experience I’ve ever had, the sunny afternoon i spent in Sweden on a day trip from Copenhagen was among the most enjoyable afternoons I’ve ever spent. At the end of a pier overlooking the bridge to Denmark, the bathhouse was a series of pretty pastel-green clapboard changing cubicles on decking, on stilts, in the ocean. The entire cross section of Swedish society appeared to be here at the baths in gender-separated sides of the bathhouse dipping in and out of the sea and in and out of the saunas. Occasionally a brave person would dunk themselves from a bucket on a rope. Even those most opposed to naturism could see its appeal on a day like this. Best of all this costs less than almost any other activity i did in my short trip to Sweden.

How to get there: A significant but not unenjoyable walk from the Turning Tower, just make your way towards the shore and head towards the bridge to Copenhagen on the horizon. You’ll see a pier. This is easily manageable as a day trip from Copenhagen.

https://www.ribersborgskallbadhus.se/sv

Teufelssee lake, Grunewald Forest, Berlin, Germany.

In English changing rooms every day, stony-faced men enter wet from the pool. They dry their upper half and then hurriedly put a t-shirt straight on. Then, hopping on one leg, and holding up a towel as a screen to hide their nudity, they put on their underpants and trousers, managing to go from wet swimming suit to fully dressed without ever once actually having been undressed. They are never seen naked and the only time they ever see other men naked it’s in the skewed fun-house mirror world of porn. In secondary school i showered in my P.E shorts, and in the whole time i was there the idea of showering was considered so perverse by my peers and such a breach of convention that we’d regularly have Rugby first thing and then go straight into the next lesson – and the rest of the day – stinking and with mud on our necks from the field. We didn’t know any different. And British society in general condones and reinforces this – I’ve read forum posts and magazine editorials – even seen a handful of celebrity guests on BBC 2’s Room 101 pick lack of shame around nudity in changing rooms as the thing they hate most about modern life in Britain – criticising people who don’t do this dance and “stride around unashamed” as if even being incidentally naked as part of the practical process of washing and dressing is the most disgusting thing in the world. Walking through the pretty woods from Grunewald station i arrived at a clearing by a lake and i was momentarily stunned. Seeing no sign of anything but wild woodland for some time, suddenly coming across this scene was like wandering into the garden of Eden. The place was packed with hundreds of people and they were all naked. On many UK nude beaches, even ten people there is alot, and they’ll mostly be men, and they’ll mostly be in their sixties and seventies. Every possible kind of person seemed to be here though at this shimmering lake – the atmosphere was like nothing else I’ve experienced. wholesome, natural, joyful. The only people not naked were those dressing to leave, everyone else was basking in the sunshine and dipping in and out of the water happily. In those moments, to be completely and unashamedly naked, it quickly became second nature and the novelty wore off for a feeling of everything being as it was always meant to have been. I have never felt more simply or more contentedly human. The gorgeous location took on an even more magical atmosphere in the afternoon as the sun set, with wild boar coming in for a cautious but mostly respectful pick through all of the sandwiches that weren’t finished by the happy hoardes hours before.

How to get there: Take the train from the main train station in Berlin to Grunewald and be prepared for an easy but fairly long walk through the forest. You’ll know when you’re there. Watch out for boars – if you catch them on a bad day they are tusked pigs with the heart of a lion and the patience of a gorilla.

Barceloneta Beach, Barcelona, Spain.

When compiling this list, it crossed my mind to exclude beaches. This is because in my experience, theres only so much a beach can do to impress you. Beaches are lovely but they’re always going to be wet at one end, and dry on the other and it’s always going to be much the same experience wherever you go. There’s only so much variety you can get. It was to my horror that after the seemingly week-long flight from England to Australia and the agony of sitting still for 24 hours, I find that the beaches on the other side of the world are exactly the beaches five minutes from my house. They are just further away, and there are twenty times more things that will kill me floating in them. One beach-going experience stood above the rest, however. The beaches of Barcelona are not the only time you can experience a nudist beach in the city centre – Split in Croatia also has one – but it is the only time you can shower naked by the side of the road in the middle of a major city within a few minute’s walk from a MacDonald’s as if there’s nothing odd about that at all. If the two unsually exposed beaches in the middle of Barcelona don’t impress, head to nearby Sitges half an hour away by train where you’ll find several other options. The two nudist beaches in the middle of Sitges are absolutely worth a shot – i accidentally went during “Bear week” (not bears of the panda or polar variety) and have never been to a busier nudist beach, walking naked through the shoreline as fish swam through my legs.

How to get there: Take the train from the main train station in Barcelona to Sitges.

So thats three for you to be getting on with – even established nudists who have only ever experienced it in the Uk may find something suffiently different to be impressed by.

If you’ve never tried it – never even considered it – it’s a world of adventure waiting for you. And just think of the space you’ll be able to save if you don’t have to pack a swimsuit…