As the nude swim approaches, nerves won’t let up. Maybe my leg hairs will stop me having a heart attack from the cold?
Photograph: Rob Blakers/AAPPhotograph: Rob Blakers/AAPym showers, sex parties, European beach holidays, walking into the wrong changing room, a knife fight in a bathhouse: there are so many ways to be naked in front of strangers. Some of them are even legal.legal, if not usually my idea of a great day out. But when given a waiver form asking you to sign away the risk of a heart attack and showing your arse on national television, who refuses that kind of invitation? Not I.
But I’m a 31-year-old with an Instagram account, so I try not to think about what I could achieve if a dark part of my brain wasn’t always appraising my own appearance, or about how I sometimes catch myself absentmindedly poking my stomach or face, testing the spring of flab.As the swim approaches, nerves catch on and won’t let up – nudity, swimming or cold, I cannot say. I get a media alert: Val and Philip March, two eightysomethings from New South Wales, will also be there on Wednesday.