All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
beliefs, nudism

Saturday Nudes

What are you doing on Saturday?

Me? I’m planning to spend as much of the day as possible without clothes because this Saturday is BN’s (British Naturism) Great British Take-off.

The idea is just to experience naturism and home nudity, so all are encouraged to spend as much of the day as possible without clothes to enjoy the liberated and exhilarating feeling that comes from being naked whether indoors or out in the fresh air and sunshine. The event is also part of BN’s efforts to raise money for their charity of the year: British Heart Foundation.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that during lockdown people are dressing less (and maybe not at all) and are keen to throw out the rule book and try something new. At any time, even in lockdown, you can be nude at home: indoors or in your garden – and it is perfectly legal.

As a general rule, nudity is not illegal in UK. You are entitled to go nude in your garden even if the garden is overlooked – unless you do so with intent to cause alarm and distress. You do not need to tell your neighbours, although you may wish to.

Public nudity is also not illegal, unless (again) it is done with intent to cause offence, alarm and distress, or it is likely to result in public disorder. Going about one’s normal activities in the nude is unlikely to fall foul of such laws; the Police and CPS have clear guidelines on this. However do note that some local authorities may have bye-laws prohibiting nudity (and even toplessness), for example in parks or on beaches; the law may also be different outside England & Wales – so it is wise to check first.

I’ve blogged before about the benefits of nudity and it isn’t just that feeling of liberation that makes nudism so worthwhile. Nudity is actually good for you, both mentally and physically. There is scientific evidence (see for example here) that nudist experience has a positive effect on body image and self-esteem. Moreover nudity helps children rather than harming them; if safely exposed to nudity they seem to grow up to become more aware and better adjusted adults.

So, temperature permitting, I shall doubtless be spending as much of Saturday as possible without raiment – as I often do – around the house. Do I go nude in the garden? Yes, but discretely! I generally don’t stray more than 12 feet or so from the backdoor; although we are overlooked the neighbours would have to peer hard to see down into this space. Most times (like 99%) if I’m going beyond the ha-ha I do at least put on a pair of shorts – there’s a fine line between being free and frightening the horses.

Here I am at a nudist club, aged 8 or 9, trying to drown my mother

Notwithstanding the above, I still hear you say “How can you do this?”. Well, I don’t have a problem with nudity – anyone’s nudity. I was introduced to naturism by my parents at the age of 8 or 9 and regularly saw my parents in the nude at home. In consequence I have never had a problem with nudity: whether seeing others or being seen. I’m comfortable in my skin, even if I maybe don’t like the amount of flesh it contains. So why do people have a problem? We all know what’s under your t-shirt and jeans, my t-shirt and jeans. I wear clothes to cover other people’s embarrassment (or if I’m cold).

So why not join in and spend Saturday tous déshabillés. You never know, you might enjoy it. And if not you don’t have to do it again.

amusements, thoughts

Greeking Hell?

It occurred to me the other day that the current cabal occupying the White House bear more than a passing resemblance to the Ancient Greek Underworld (and Roman too). The pantheon seems to stack up roughly as:

Pluto President Trump
Cerberus Mike Pompeo
Caron Vice-President Pence
Eurynomos Jared Kushner
Thanatos Eric Trump
Hypnos Barron Trump
The Eumenides Melania, Ivanka & Tiffany Trump

Or is it, as some have suggested, more like something from Heironymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights?

personal, ramblings

Horrible Times 7

Today is Day 60 of quarantine for me. Yes, I’ve not been off the premises in the last 60 days; Noreen has been out just a handful of times, mostly just to the postbox.

It’s all a bit tedious, although everything seems to have settled down into a new non-rhythm – things aren’t as fraught was they were 6 weeks ago, although the thought of either of us getting this lurgy still induces a fit of the horrors.

Anyway, just by way of a small celebration, I though I would document half a dozen good, and the same number of not so good, things which have happened here in the last 60 days.

Good Not So Good
  • We’re managing to eat extremely well – probably better than normal – to keep the spirits up!
  • Super fruit & veg deliveries from First Choice Produce, as occasional treats
  • Spring sunshine & warmth
  • Roses already in full bloom, and some of the tulips have been magnificent this year (see below)
  • Been doing some gardening – though not as much as is needed
  • Friends helping each other, and looking out for each other
  • It’s just too hard to motivate oneself to do very much
  • Cannot get massage to ease my back
  • Idiot neighbours who have workmen in to do totally inessential work during lockdown
  • Other idiot neighbours who, while one member of the household is ill with Covid-19, have friends round for coffee
  • Death of a friend (not from Covid-19) and no funeral to go to
  • We had to buy a new fridge
Lady Hillingdon Rose
Lady Hillingdon Rose (click image for larger view)
Pink Tulip
Pink Tulip (click image for larger view)

Be good and stay safe, and hopefully the gods will allow us all to survive.

amusements, memes

Ten Things: May

This year our Ten Things series, on the tenth of each month, is concentrating on things which are wackier than usual, if not by much. From odd road names to Christmas carols by way of saints and scientists. So here goes with May …

Ten Quotes

  1. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
    As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
    To taste whole joys
    [John Donne, 1699] (right)
  2. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
    [Benjamin Franklin]
  3. My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.
    [Indira Gandhi]
  4. If you don’t concern yourself with your wife’s cat, you will lose something irretrievable between you.
    [Haruki Murakami; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle]
  5. Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste more like prunes than a rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know?
    [Groucho Marx]
  6. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
    [Caius Petronius]
  7. In converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork.
    [William Shakespeare]
  8. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
    [George Bernard Shaw]
  9. The key aspect that makes the Buddhist attitude toward sex utterly different is that the concept of sin does not exist in Buddhism.
    [Brad Warner; Sex, Sin and Zen] (also right)
  10. No-one else is he and thus cannot deny that he knows when fish are happy.
    [Zhuang Zi]
amusements, natural history, photography

Squirrel

In the latest episode of photos from my Flickr, we have the local squirrel and it’s hunters – finally captured on film this morning thanks to my new Canon 90D and a mega-long zoom lens.

[Click the images to get a larger view on Flickr]

Squirrel 1

We have this grey squirrel around the garden who has almost no hair on its tail. It looks very odd, especially when he sits around doing that squirrel thing of waving its tail. It’s been around all winter and otherwise looks to be in good health, so there’s no obvious reason for the hair loss.

Squirrel 2

As this next photo shows he’s male, and has been observed knocking up the ladies!

Squirrel 3

While he’s happily devouring our bird seed, Tilly cat approaches from starboard …

Squirrel Hunt 2

… and Boy cat undertakes a blocking manoeuvre to port, while desperately hoping the squirrel falls off!

Squirrel Hunt 1

Needless to say, the squirrel won with a good six foot leap from the top of the feeder pole to the apple tree. But it needs to be careful as Tilly is known to have caught a squirrel in the past.

And notice the wildlife-friendly, aka. unkempt, bottom half of our garden. It is sort-of half intended to be woodland floor!

food+drink, history, links, science

Monthly Links

Yet once more a month has passed and we come to my collection of links to items you may have missed and didn’t want to.

Science, Technology, Natural World

If we found extraterrestrials, why should we expect them to look like anything we know?

Rather surprisingly many genes are not necessary for survival, and some species have lost quite a few.

Plants have unexpected ways to communicate, problem solve and socialise – indeed a whole secret life!

Blue Tits in Germany are dying and no-one knows quite why.

What’s in an Antarctic lake? Travel down a borehole Lake Whillans.

We live on a planet. But just what is a planet?

With clearer skies and time on our hands, here are a few tips about stargazing from your backyard.

Environment

A speculative drill in Cornwall for a souyrce of lithium has uncovered a potentially important copper deposit.

History, Archaeology, Anthropology

The earliest known skull of Homo erectus has been found in South Africa.

Melting ice on a Viking-era mountain pass in Norway is revealing some spectacular artefacts.

In another story of ice, this time in the Alps, it seems that the record of lead pollution may reflect the murder of Thomas Beckett.

The mystery of the medieval sweating sickness.

Renaissance Europe was beset with paranoia about the pox leading to the rapid spread of guilt, scapegoats and wonder-cures.

And a bit more up to date, there has long been a puzzle over the early April sunrise shining through Brunel’s Box Tunnel near Bath.

Food, Drink

When do we need to adhere to expiry dates and when can they be flexed?

Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs

Hints and tips on how to clean 10 annoying things around your home.

And finally, in our only concession to Coronavirus, here’s our favourite Zen master on dealing with what might happen – or it might not happen.

Be good, and stay safe!

food+drink, ramblings

Ingredients

2 Comments

Being idle as I am, I fell to thinking about food. Well who doesn’t?

Now there are very few things I really will not eat. Oysters and tripe are two which immediately spring to mind.

But there are quite a few things which, if you show me a recipe or a menu item containing them, I’ll pass on by. Pretty much top of the list are:

  • Sweet Potato
  • Butternut Squash

however they are rapidly followed by:

  • Pomegranate
  • Pumpkin
  • Gnocchi
  • Polenta
  • Tofu
  • Sourdough
  • Spelt
  • Cavalo nero

Those top 10 are followed by a few lesser horrors which will be considered under duress:

  • Beetroot
  • Goat’s cheese
  • Kale
  • Cranberry
  • Sweetcorn
  • Egg custard

And there are a few cuisine choices/combinations I will avoid:

  • Anything sweet with meat – I can’t abide jam with meat!
  • Anything which is unnecessarily vegan
  • Pretty much anything that I don’t know what it is – why do all chefs have to always include something which no-one has ever heard of?

And I am sure there are others I’ve forgotten.

But why is this? Well obviously it is in part because I actually don’t like many of them them and sometimes that is down to texture as much as taste. I’d eat them if I had to but I’ll never choose to if there is a half-decent alternative. But it is also partly because many (though not all) are/have recently been trendy and fashionable, which I find an immediate turn-off – I’m resistant to jumping on bandwagons and following the herd: thank you, I’ll decide what I eat, drink, like, think, believe; I don’t need you to decide for me!

I’m sure I’m not alone in this. What do other people refuse to eat not necessarily because they dislike it?

environment, ramblings, science

Much More than Environmental Reform

My friend Ivan had recety started a new blog, Restored World. In Ivan’s words:

I have created this website to share my thoughts and reflections on how we might respond in new ways to the needs of our damaged, ailing world. What has led me to speak out here is my belief that our current way of thinking and doing things is not only inappropriate but continues to harm us.

It is clear from our collective struggles to even begin to address the climate emergency, the mass species extinction, increasing inequality, or other challenges such as the present spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, that we appear trapped … within an outdated mode of thinking that determines our functioning, a mode no longer appropriate to the immense challenges we face in the present global crisis.

We collectively all need renewal, myself included, if the world in which we live is to be restored. My hope is that this website, which is a personal account of my search for that renewal, can be a small contribution to our collective effort in imagining how we will restore our world.

Although Ivan and I are coming at the problem from different perspectives (and this blog is more wide-ranging) we seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Ivan is a thinker, and as a professional writer is much more eloquent in expressing his views than am I.

One thing reading Ivan’s thoughts has done is to goad me into finishing something I started long ago: encapsulating the way I see the complexity of environmental reform in a diagram.

Environmental Reform Diagram

Environmental reform isn’t easy. As the above diagram shows it involves a whole interdependent network of actions and effects which revolve around three core necessities:

  • Reform of Agriculture and Fisheries
  • Reform of Natural Resource Usage
  • Reform of Energy Production.

There are a number of obvious entry points to the network, although starting anywhere one can is better than not starting at all.

What this doesn’t show is the necessity to reduce our reliance on product, and reform both our dominant capitalist hegemony and our broken political system. Each will be another complex network and connecting these reform networks will be yet another level of interdependent network – and I haven’t thought about any of that, yet! We could start on this anywhere, in any of the networks, and hopefully actions in one place will flow through into the other networks.

None of this is easy. But we have to start somewhere and hopefully the current Coronavirus pandemic will trigger the paradigm shift we need, which will flow over into real action on climate change and global reform.

Wish us luck!