My dad tells me the story of when he, back in 1951, aged eighteen, goes to the Lido on Lake Zürich—where he’s grown up and where he has turned himself into a Swiss Youth Champion swimmer—to try out nude bathing.
Being Switzerland and Continental Europe, Zürich has no problem with nude bathing in 1951, and so there is a designated nudist section of the Lido where swimming naked in the Lake may be relished at nature-embracing liberty by anyone so inclined.
“I walked out of the changing rooms, a little shy and uncertain, holding my towel in front of me,” I’ve seen pictures of my dad at that age—not, I hasten to add, in the nude, but wearing his swimming trunks, and in one of them, I believe, his chest adorned with a medal, or so I seem to remember—and my dad as an eighteen-year-old is exceptionally handsome, he’s a youth champion swimmer, after all, “and there were all these saggy old men, with drooping bits everywhere.”
I laugh my head off at the thought of my adonis dad walking out into a world full of saggy old men and drooping bits everywhere. They put him right off, so he turned around straight away and never went back, unsurprisingly.
The image, though, lingers…
EDEN by FREI 