I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones in a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of Front Royal, Virginia, a gateway town just north of Shenandoah National Park. I’d been a fan of the books since 1998, and was incredibly excited to see how HBO would manage to bring it to the screen. From the first few seconds of Ramin Djawadi’s iconic theme to Bran Stark’s climactic descent from the tower window, everything about the pilot was note-perfect, and I remember rolling over on my hotel bed with a massive, goofy smile on my face at just how good it had been.
11 years later we found ourselves in Northern Ireland, where many of the show’s scenes were filmed over its eight seasons. On our penultimate day there, we hired a car and drove up the Antrim coast. The views were spectacular, the sky was a glorious blue…and pretty much every five minutes, I found myself idly humming the Game of Thrones theme tune.
I don’t have a catchphrase or a life motto; very few of the things in which I believe most deeply can be boiled down to a handful of words or a pithy aphorism. But if I had to pick one expression that summed up my attitude to sex, photography, my friends, adventure, and sure, life generally, it might just be the title of this post: challenge accepted!
I am game for most things (you may have noticed): the more ridiculous or extravagant, the better. So when Exposing 40 mentioned casually a while back that she was trying to take nudes in each of London’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries*, obviously I wanted to get involved. And that’s exactly what I’ve done! From the silliness of Highgate’s perfectly-located Vault of Cockshott to the muted colours and contrasts of Tower Hamlets, I helped with two of the six she ticked off over the last couple of years – leaving only one to go.
The first thing we do after getting to our holiday home is allocate bedrooms. Three couples, three double rooms; all lovely, light and well-furnished…but only one of them has a chaise longue. That’ll be ours then.
“You’d better believe I’m getting drawn like one of your French girls,” I say (and tweet).
The chaise longue is next to a window, facing east. In the mornings it’ll be flooded with sunlight, and I think about how that’ll feel on my skin when I’m stretched out naked, a cool breeze drifting over me.
It’s a year to the day since we moved to Croydon and bought this house. Clearly a lot has happened since then! Even beyond its direct victims and their friends/families, I don’t think any of us will emerge from the Covid pandemic completely unscarred (for every person beset by loneliness, there’ll be another trapped with people they hate; for every job loss, there’s a role changed beyond recognition by home working, etc etc), but I have no problem admitting that we’ve been luckier than most, and our living situation is a big part of that.
We have space here, space we never had in Brixton, and we also have a garden. Especially as parents of a very active toddler, both those things have been hugely beneficial where our mental health is concerned. To our surprise, we’ve also been helped massively on that front by Croydon itself.
Ah yes, unlovely Croydon. Much like unlovely Swindon, which I also came to feel a deep affection towards (in a way) during my two years there, our new home is an easy punchline for jokes about, well, shit places to live. And the resemblances don’t end there. In both cases, brutalist architecture, a moribund town centre, and a parochialism among sections of the population that’s easy to mock, are more than offset by qualities that the casual visitor may miss.
The clocks went back last night, which means it’s officially THAT time of year. You know the one I mean? When you look out of the window at 4.30pm to find it’s already dark, and each morning seems to bring with it a slightly more menacing chill in the air. When the sad remnants of those joyous piles of crunchy autumn leaves lie plastered to the pavement by sleeting rain, and you feel the damp clinging to your skin and clothes as you scurry down the street, breath billowing out in front of you.
In a normal year, we’d be looking right now to the small, simple comforts – the baggy jumpers, hot chocolates, toasted teacakes, and favourite movies – to sustain us through winter’s first biting salvo. In 2020, with its Covid lockdowns and its election anxiety and – oh God – impending no-deal Brexit, those things feel even more essential than ever.
That’s one of the reasons why I found myself in Berlin this week. With a sister and nephew to visit there, I try to get across at least once a year, but really they were just a pretext this time. Because alongside the jumpers and the teacakes, solo travel is very much one of my comforts. The destination is a huge bonus, of course, especially when it’s a city as awesome as Berlin, but the mindless process of getting from A to B is often hugely satisfying in itself, as is the cloak of anonymity provided by the hotel room at the end of a journey.
On my first afternoon in Berlin, I spent a couple of hours lounging naked on the comfortable double bed. I slept for a bit, I masturbated, and in between those activities I snapped a few casual nudes. There was a full-width mirror alongside the bed, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to pose in front of it, camera in hand. I didn’t try to make the photos themselves too fancy. Instead I just shot what I saw in the mirror, tweeted a couple of the better images, and put my phone away.
It was only a couple of days later on the plane home, when I was thinking about all the different ways in which the trip had been relaxing – had been just what I needed really – that my mind drifted back to that 20-minute session. It occurred to me that at a time when pleasure is in short supply, and we all face the prospect of cold dark days and nights inside, doing something that actively makes me feel good about my body is really just another form of nourishing self-care.
In winter – all bundled up and sedentary – it’s all too easy to lose touch with what I like about my physical appearance, and with the things that make me feel sexy. Taking, sharing, posting, and even just looking at nudes is a way to combat that, just as drinking hot chocolate is a way to banish the bone-deep chill that follows you inside after a stampy, splashy walk in the rain.
Over the last 48 hours, I’ve stripped off and snapped some nudes on a couple more occasions. None of the photos I ended up with are particularly arty or special – they’re just shots where I think my body looks nice, which right now is enough to trigger a little jolt of happiness. I highly recommend that you try it!
I thought I’d share a few of those nothing-special photos here today. I expect there will be plenty more to come over the next few weeks and months!
Of all the possible topics for a sex blogger to try and cover in an interesting and original way, ‘fucking from behind’ doesn’t exactly feel like the most promising option. Whether they love it or loathe it (and I think it’s fair to say most people fall into the first of those boxes), pretty much everyone has an opinion on doggy sex, or at the very least a working idea of what it involves. What possible value could there be in churning out 2,500 words on what is literally one of the most popular sex positions in the world?
Well apparently that’s just my cross to bear. And obviously Twitter is 100% to blame. A few days ago, I (very approvingly) shared this photo of a variation on what I’ll refer to in this post as ‘regular doggy’. As I said at the time, ‘collapsed doggy’ – where the person getting penetrated sinks down from hands and knees to a largely prone position, while the person doing the penetrating straddles their partner’s ass and moves forward till their arms are either side of their partner’s chest or shoulders – is not only the best way to have PIV sex from behind, it’s one of the best ways to fuck full stop. I followed up what I thought was a relatively uncontroversial opinion with an offhand comment about the ’17 different reasons’ why that was true.
The wheel is turning pretty slowly for me at the moment. August is the quietest time of year for my industry, so after a couple of (very) near misses on the interview front in late July, I mentally checked out of the job hunt for a few weeks.
One of the best discoveries we’ve made since moving to Croydon is just how easily we can access wide-open spaces and sprawling woodland. From Riddlesdown Common to Farthing Downs, Croham Hurst Woods to Banstead Wood, we can jump into the car on a Sunday afternoon – or indeed a Wednesday – and be out in what feels like the middle of nowhere in less than 25 minutes. Given that it takes almost exactly the same amount of time to get the train into Victoria, we seem to have found (quite by accident) the perfect midway point between the hustle and bustle of the city and the (relative) wilderness.
As longtime blog readers will know, I love finding excuses to strip off in the great outdoors (or, well, anywhere), and have gleefully taken advantage of opportunities to get naked in Epping Forest and Boxley Wood over the last few years – and even in the great, primeval Białowieża Forest in the east of Poland. Something about a treetop canopy, piles of moss and leaves beneath my feet, and the particular quiet that descends on you once you penetrate the first few rows of trees…well, I can rarely resist at least looking out for potential photo spots.
So when Liv and I went for a wander in an almost entirely empty Banstead Woods on a rainy weekday afternoon, in the middle of lockdown, it was pretty inevitable that one or both of us would end up getting our kit off. A small, sunlit glade and a fallen tree-trunk provided the perfect opportunity to strip off, step up…and stretch out…
Before lockdown, I was running roughly three times a week, depending on weather, work, hockey, and my general enthusiasm levels. Each outing followed a similar pattern: start sluggishly, grimace and set my face against the wind and rain, find some sort of easy stride, wait till I hit two miles, then head home and breathe a (heavy) sigh of relief at the sight of our front gate. It’s fair to say I wasn’t loving life on the trail over autumn and winter.
However, since lockdown my entire approach to the routine of running has changed – or rather, it’s returned to roughly where it was in 2015 and 2016, when I was training for marathons in Berlin and Warsaw. Not in distance terms (not yet anyway…), nor in speed – I’m lucky if I do 5K in 23 minutes right now, whereas 3-4 years ago I was consistently sub-22 minutes – but perhaps more importantly I feel like I’ve found my rhythm again.
