Scared of the skin you’re in

ANDREW Welch is doing the ironing. Also, he’s naked. “I didn’t suddenly decide ‘how marvellous, I must take my clothes off’,” he explains matter-of-factly down the phone. “It’s just warm here today.”

Welch is a naturist, and the commercial manager of British Naturism, an organisation that has been much in the news in the past week thanks to Kimberley Craigie, their newly appointed 18-year-old rep for Scotland and Northern England. Craigie, who herself has been an enthusiastic naturist since the age of 13, wants more people to get naked, and isn’t afraid to appear in the buff to get her message across. Her comments have caused something of a stushie, with tabloid newspapers queueing up to feature her pictures, and publications as far away as Holland chasing her for an interview.

“It’s been a bit overwhelming, but it’s been good,” Glaswegian Craigie says at the end of an exhausting week of attempting to recruit wannabe young naturists to the cause.

“I’m just trying to get people to realise it’s not a bad thing to want to wander around naked. My theory is that if you look at somebody fully dressed you’re thinking about what’s underneath, but  if you look at somebody and they’re naked, you’re not wondering what’s underneath, you’re looking at their personality.”

She may have an uphill battle. In Scotland, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, nudity is still viewed as one of the last taboos. Last month Stephen Gough, aka the Naked Rambler, was arrested in Fife just days after being released from prison. He has spent more than six years in jail for refusing to wear clothes in public. The Scottish Outdoor Club, a group who hold regular naturist events on an island in Loch Lomond, reported in July that its membership had halved in recent years. And Edinburgh Airport certified its prudish credentials last week by covering up a poster featuring a Picasso nude that advertised an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

John Leighton, director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, was flabbergasted. “It is obviously bizarre that all kinds of images of women in various states of dress and undress can be used in contemporary advertising without comment, but somehow a painted nude by one of the world’s most famous artists is found to be disturbing and has to be removed,” he remarked.

The airport eventually relented, and apologised for what it inexpertly described as “the confusion”. But the question remains: why do we still get hung up on letting it all hang out?

“It’s seen as risqué and titillating to see a bit of skin you’re not meant to see,” says chartered psychologist Dr Andrina McCormack. “Rightly or wrongly, we connect nudity with sex. Comedians like Frankie Howerd made a whole career out of it, while people like Peter Stringfellow have made a fortune out of nudity as entertainment. It’s that whole idea of naughtiness and going against convention and taking a risk. The Victorian ideal of being covered up has stuck, as has the church’s negative attitudes towards nudity, which stem right back to Adam and Eve.”

Welch says the Picasso poster fiasco perfectly demonstrates the British difficulty with nakedness. “It’s something that has nudity in it, so the perception is that it must be wrong. But if you were to challenge people who say it’s wrong, they probably couldn’t tell you why. It’s just based on prejudice and discrimination.”

But McCormack says our concerns with nudity go further. “Nudity, more than anything else, makes us feel vulnerable,” she says. “If you think about prisons, or concentration camps, people were stripped to disempower them and to make them vulnerable. If you’re stripped, you also lose your dignity, and that is crucially important to your self-esteem. Clothes and covering the body tells people who we are, from uniforms to suits to formal dress. If we lose them we become just one of many.”

Certainly the younger generation – constantly served up images of perfect semi-naked bodies in magazines and music videos – seems to have a muddled image of body perfection that has many of them unwilling to drop the towel in anything other than the most private of environments.

Yet conversely, Craigie says that her naturism has helped boost her body confidence.

“It really has helped me emotionally with my confidence,” she says. “I’ve learned to love my own body because I realised there was nobody there to have a go at me.”

At school, she says she suffered because of her interest. “I found it quite difficult,” she says. “I had a few friends who weren’t supportive but I stuck with them because I didn’t want to lose their friendship. Then I finally became mature and I thought, ‘I don’t need friends like that, so I got rid of them. The friends I do have are very supportive of me. They make jokes, but not hurtful ones.”

Craigie says she’s been unable to persuade any of them to join her though. “They’re all too self-conscious about their own bodies.”

McCormack says: “The positive side of nudity is that it’s a great leveller. It’s logical that as a consequence of being naked, if you get over the titillation side, you see that everybody is just a person and if people could only see men and women as people first, it would make life an awful lot easier.”

So why then are Scotland’s hills and glens not filled with happy naturists, gamboling in the gloaming? Welch says it has a lot to do with the weather. And, one suspects, the midges.

“I would say 95 per cent of all naturists in Scotland probably do most of their naturism on holiday,” he admits. “That’s the case for the whole country. We did a survey with Ipsos Mori recently that showed that almost four million people in the UK called themselves naturists. So where are they all? Sunning their backsides on beaches in Greece, probably.”

British Naturism is attempting to change that. They run an annual camp called Nudefest in England, where activities include volleyball, board games, an improbable sounding archery tournament, and bingo (eyes, presumably, down).

“Everyone has a blast – they’re nice to each other and there’s no bullying,” says Craigie. “Everyone is very relaxed and that makes me feel really relaxed as well.”

In Scotland, we might not quite be ready for that. A BBC documentary on nudism in Scotland, Wearing The One-Buttoned Suit, showed a group of naturists dancing together who were so paranoid about being revealed in public as nudists, they wore masks.

“They insisted on wearing the masks,” the documentary maker Carolyn Mills said at the time. “Some of their workmates don’t know what they do at the weekends. Scotland is still so prudish.”

For Welch however, naturism is simple. “We’re just normal people who take their clothes off.”

Even, it seems, while doing the ironing.