Would you go to a naked dining club?

Why would anyone want to dine in the nude with other nude diners? Yes, I get being nude on a sunny beach. Swimming nude. Walking nude. But eating nude in public? What’s the appeal? Why leave your comfort zone for the Twilight Zone?

Yet nude dining is making a comeback — or at least it’s trying to. The food-in-the-nude movement was just taking off in Bristol — and various secret places in London — when Covid first struck. Now that things are going back to normal, the normal are going nude.

Ever curious, I went to an event billed as the ‘first in a new series of nude supper clubs’ to find out. It offered canapés, cocktails and a three-course dinner in a ‘safe’ sex-free zone that would leave me with a ‘positive, life-affirming experience’.

This ‘secret event’ — organised by ‘Emma and James’ in collaboration with the British Nudism Club — was held in a small village in West Sussex. It’s the sort of quiet place where you’d expect to find Miss Marples peeping through the net curtains. Little did I know that I’d find my very own Miss Marples in the nude, munching canapés and peeping at me.

‘Andrew’s doing his bit by abstaining from long-haul flights.’

The dinner was held in the local church hall. I watched as my fellow diners — men (it was mostly men) and women in their late fifties and sixties — arrived fully clothed. We non-nudists tend to think of nudists as a bit eccentric at best and a bit dodgy at worst. I confess I played the mental game of spot-the-perv and find-the-exhibitionist. Alas, they were all terribly normal and nice. Too normal. Too nice. Where’s a good old nutty nudist when you need one?

We sipped prosecco and made small talk.