Naked truths(recycling this from an old newsletter!) I’m enjoying being back at the gym. There’s a chain here in Stockholm called Friskis & Svettis, which translates as ‘healthy and sweaty’. The first thing I noticed when joining was that here in Sweden everyone goes to the gym. Not every person, but every type of person. The ‘bodybuilders’ are in the minority. I go midday and there are lots of people in their 70s and 80s. The other notable thing is the nakedness. It’s a big gym, in the women’s changing rooms there are showers and a sauna, rows of lockers and benches. I’ll walk in and there are all these elderly women walking around butt naked, without any sense of self-consciousness. One woman is just out of the shower when her friend walks in, she stands there totally naked, having a long conversation with her friend, who’s yet to take her coat off, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And it is. Another woman is bent over double, drying her feet, completely carefree about the fact that we can see all the way up her wazoo. It’s so therapeutic! Bodies all shapes and sizes, old bodies, like beautiful gnarly olive trees. How relaxing. (“Everyone wants to be naked, but some don’t want to be everyone.”)
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