New Beach Habit, Two Stolen Bikes

I stopped my mountain bike beside a beach where a few adults weren't wearing anything, and immediately started considering joining them. This was not on my cycling itinerary, which so far consisted of riding near the coast and eventually riding back. A quick flash-forward: by the end of that day, my partner and I would have discovered a new shared pleasure, and both our mountain bikes would have been stolen. Those two facts still make an extremely irritating pair.

At that first stop, though, I was alone and genuinely curious. I'd come across the beach by accident, not worked myself up to a planned naturist debut, so there was no swimsuit decision to revisit or grand promise to keep. I could carry on riding, or I could stop and try something that suddenly looked appealing. I wanted to try it; I just needed a moment to stop treating that as an outrageous suggestion from my own brain.

I wheeled the bike onto the sand, where pushing it took more effort than I'd expected. Turning the handlebars, I stepped sideways and reached down to lower the bicycle onto the sand. There was nothing graceful about manoeuvring a mountain bike while trying to look as though I knew exactly what I was doing. Once it was down, I took off my clothes and put them beside it, giving the small pile rather more attention than arranging clothes really deserved.

Then I stepped away from my clothes and turned toward the sea, naked on a beach for the first time. For a few seconds I was very aware that I'd actually done it, rather than just had an interesting thought beside a bicycle. But the experience was delightful, and the nerves didn't get the prolonged starring role I'd expected. I didn't need to swim or do anything impressive to make the stop worthwhile; simply being there without swimwear was enough.

What surprised me was how quickly I stopped mentally checking whether I was comfortable and started enjoying myself. I'd expected the absence of clothes to demand all my attention, but it didn't. I had gone out for a bike ride and found something I wanted to do again before the day was even over. By the time I dressed, the question wasn't whether this had been a terrible idea; it was whether my partner would want to come back with me.

That same afternoon, I returned to the beach with him and our two mountain bikes. There was something faintly ridiculous about bringing someone to a place I'd only just discovered and already feeling eager to show it to him. "This is the beach I meant," I said, which was a considerably more restrained introduction than the running commentary in my head. My first visit had been an unexpected personal experiment; this time, naturism became something we discovered together.

Now for the part that makes the happy version of this story impossible to tell on its own: both mountain bikes were stolen that day. Not one bicycle, which would have been bad enough, but the pair we'd used to get there. I can still be pleased about finding naturism and furious about losing our transport without either feeling cancelling the other out. Taking off our clothes was something we'd chosen; losing two bicycles absolutely wasn't part of the arrangement.

Despite that, we kept practising naturism whenever the surroundings allowed it. The theft didn't turn the beach discovery into something we wished we'd never tried, although it certainly spoiled any claim that we'd found a completely free new interest. There's no bicycle recovery to add as a reassuring final twist, just the pleasure we continued to get from being without clothes in suitable places. We kept the beach habit; unfortunately, we didn't keep the mountain bikes.