Vile Bodies

Was thinking about that TV programme, Embarrassing Bodies. My first body memory was of being in a bath, wearing a kind of cyclist's cape being bathed by a nun who turned away while washing me with a large sponge. I was about four or so. I decided then and there that bodies must be rather disgusting and unmentionable, since being naked around other people was obviously not an option. At any time.

At home my mother would walk around completely starkers when upstairs, a sight we were well used to. This did seem strange to me, but we always knew our mother was considered to be beautiful. My stepfather, when not fully clothed, wore pyjamas, and a dressing gown and slippers. So did we.

At boarding school we got dressed and undressed awkwardly in the dormitories under our dressing gowns so no 'sights' were seen. Except Penny, a rather large and tall new girl who unselfconsciously stripped off and strode around the dormitory to our complete shock until she realised the effect she was causing and learned to be 'modest' like the rest of us.

The only time I ever thought bodies might not be so dreadful was when I was about ten, out swimming, and a boy told me that I should be proud of my body, that people's bodies were all natural and fine. This seemed a revolutionary idea, but I was not convinced.

Even when I got married I always wore extremely unsexy nightclothes and insisted on the lights being off in the bedroom before lovemaking. I had been very surprised some years before, when at 15, I was walking with some French boys and girls in the South of France, and feeling hot, to see that most of them stripped off and went swimming in a mountain lake together. There was no ogling or pruriency as there would have been in England. Though in the late fifties, this would never have happened in England, and I had been rather shocked, though envious that they behaved so naturally.

Apart from my body now turning into the horrific sight it never was in earlier years, nothing much has changed. At least I now feel totally justified in remaining covered - though my sister Nibby has always wanted to paint me in the nude 'all those mountains of flesh, and lumps and bumps!' she rhapsodises. No chance, Nibs!

I seem to definitely have Alzheimers as I distinctly remember writing about all this before a year or two ago. Oh well. But at that time the new menace, the airport body scanner, wasn't about. For me, at least, foreign travel is no longer an option. All those parts now modestly covered in clothing will be revealed by these infernal machines.