Naked on My Beach

It is now well known that I moved off the mountain to new quarters in a small cave near the beach. I like the beach, as do most Ozfolk. And my nearest beach, just a few hundred metres as the seagulls fly, is one of the most well served city beaches in the world. It has good walks, fine sand, generally placid waters and a couple of very pleasant cafes.

Kiddies play and young couples walk holding hands, old folk saunter holding their walking sticks, and the 'yoof' of both sexes cavort in the water and on the floating raft tethered just 50 metres off the beach...... in the hot summer.

And once a year we get inundated with naked bodies cavorting in the almost freezing cold of the winter solstice.

The occasional cute bum is noticeable if you look hard between all the fat ones and the drooping bits of the not-so-cute.

Not every naked body is beautiful. 

This marks the end of 'Dark Mofo', an erzatz celebration of winter devised by the darker minds of the Tasmanian arty-farties. And this ending happens on my beach !!

It is an opportunity for usually quite mad people to get their kit off and prove how mad they really are by leaping into the cold water. And cold it is. The air temperature this time of year gets just about all the way up to double figures on a nice day but the waters come down the river via the pristine streams of the Big mountain's snow-melt. The waters come up the river too from the Great Southern Ocean across which the next landmass is Antarctica. That water is pristine too and just as cold. 

Frankly, you have to be nuts to leap about in it naked. But we have many nuts in Hilary's Village. You've heard the adage, "I may look green but I ain't a cabbage'. Well some down here are green and they have cabbagey arses.

Some uber-queer ones too.

You may be assured that I did not join them although I do offer a small and sincere thank-you to Nikki Davis-Jones for taking the snaps for evidence. Search as you may but you will not see my chain-mail-underpants-clad backside there.

Had it been a brilliantly sunny day though.....

But as you can see, it was anything but. Just why this young couple decided to leave a far warmer Sydney to frolic in our cold water, beats me.  There no accounting for taste.

You won't catch a Knight out on a day like that. Not without his armour, anyway.

Have a hot toddy.

Perhaps even sit with someone more suitably dressed.

Pax.