I travelled overseas for work this week, for the first time in over five years. It was an intense and exhausting trip, which reminded me of all the things I love (cool new cities, big hotel beds, dinner on expenses) and hate (being away from family, long hours, transport disasters) about business travel.
The transport disaster came on my way back to London, when my late-evening flight was postponed due to ‘bad weather’, forcing me to spend an extra night away. To make things worse, Easyjet dicked us around at the airport for long enough that by the time they finally got everyone booked into a nearby hotel, it was pushing 2am.
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.
I did not intend to write this post on a Tuesday! For one thing, I’m roughly 36 hours too late for the link-up deadline, so don’t stand any chance of winning one of the fabulous prizes Molly has lined up for this most auspicious of Sinful Sundays. For another…well, the clue is in the name! This is in no way a midweek meme, yet here I am, styling it out like a schoolboy trying to get away with handing in an overdue piece of homework.
Any other week, I obviously wouldn’t bother. I’d wait another five days and post it to the next link-up instead. However, this is not ‘any other week’, and it’s definitely not just any other Sinful Sunday. As most of you reading this will already know, it’s Sinful Sunday #500! How could I not take part??
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!
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.
The woods are quiet during lockdown. On dirt-grey weekday afternoons they’re rarely busy anyway, but since the world ground to a halt even the dogwalkers have abandoned the narrow paths that wind their way between the viridescent thickets, under a canopy dense enough to block out any ambient noise from the busy London suburb in which the woods sit.
Paradoxically, the silence makes it hard at first to be sure just where the sound is coming from. It’s both faint and somehow all around you, as if it’s echoing from one tree trunk to the next. If it wasn’t for the rhythm – metronomic and insistent – you’d dismiss it as wet leaves slapping against bark. That’s what it sounds like, but as you close your eyes and try to pin down where it’s coming from, you realise that it’s firmer, more substantial.
