“This is what your mother looks like naked!”

“We’re going for a swim later”, said Hilary.
“We’re going skinny dipping”, said Bev.
I laughed and wondered where, because I’d just come from the crowded lake. Undoubtedly you CAN skinny dip in the lake. It’s been known to happen after dark, or in the very early morning. But on a warm and sunny July evening the lake throngs with teenagers. There is much splashing and strutting, little actual swimming, it’s not a time preferred by our usual swimming crowd even with a costume.

To be sure, the middle of the lake can be fairly empty of swimmers. I’ve known people in even a fairly busy lake to remove their costumes underwater: the muddy Bristol channel water is a good concealer if the tide has recently come over the wall. But still, I expected they meant at some quiet beach or secret get-in point of the Bristol Channel itself.

And yet, it was hours to high tide, the only time you can swim in the channel. So I did wonder how they were going to achieve a skinny dip, and yet was reluctant to enquire where: they might have asked me along and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.

So I wondered, on the way home.

I am sometimes accused of overthinking: a skinny dip does not require the cover of darkness, a quiet beach, or the concealment of opaque water. All it actually requires is to go swimming, without a swimming costume.

Hilary was so subtle as to actually wear a costume to the water, but then rather gave the game away by ostentatiously swinging it about her head.

Bev strode to the water in all the clothes she was born in. Horrified teenagers scattered.
“This is what your mother looks like naked!” she declared, and she got in.