naked again and back in prison again

I read today that the ‘naked rambler’ Stephen Gough (how easy for me to mistype his name) was back in court and then immediately back in prison for insisting on wearing no clothes in public. I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of his case before, but he says he will choose to spend the rest of his life behind bars if necessary to defend his right to walk around in his birthday suit. Here is the background to his story from last year when it made headlines, and here is the latest development – released from prison again, but arrested again in just 60 seconds.

There is something fascinating about nudity as it plays strange tricks with the invisible boundaries we create or discover inside our minds: childhood and adulthood; sex, of course; intimacy and space; friendship and familiarity; comfort of the body; decoration of the body; health and hygiene for the body … and then death, when we return to the nudity from which we came. There is undoubtedly a strong streak of prudishness behind a lot of our reactions to nudity, yet ironically most of us would agree that some clothing is actually sexier than top to bottom, unadorned flesh. And we see threadbare bikinis and pulled-low underwear on a daily basis all around us.

I’ve just returned home from Marrakech where I tried a couple of the traditional Hammam treatments. The extraordinary thing for a Westerner in a Muslim country is their absolute demand for non-nudity. Even in a shower situation in a single-sex environment the fully naked body is totally unacceptable. I was given the skimpiest, paper underwear to wear – a fig-leaf barely large enough to hold a fig – but it was apparently enough to satisfy the traditions. It reminded me of when I was at the main Hammam in Istanbul a few years ago and, walking from the shower to my locker, seeing a panic-stricken attendant race towards me with a huge towel and a look of horror, as if he had been about to damp down a raging fire. Mind you, female visitors to churches in Latin countries have been turned away because their arms were exposed, only to find the buxom woman behind them let through without a problem.

The Stephen Gough case is admittedly rather eccentric. I feel sorry for the man, but I also feel sorry for those of us who have such a problem with his eccentricity – not to mention an annoyance at his unnecessary occupation of a prison cell for a year.