On public nudity

UPFRONT:THERE ARE PLENTY of occasions when it's okay, even desirable, to run into an ex-boyfriend. When you've just returned, all bronzed and rested, from a sun holiday somewhere exotic and enviable, for example. Or when you're all glammed up at a very exclusive party at which the light is dim and forgiving. Having just received an Oscar or on your way to accepting a Nobel prize are other excellent scenarios for bumping into former paramours. Ideally, with your current paramour in tow, who is, it turns out, just a smidgen taller. Perfect.

And then there are the occasions when it’s not okay to run into an ex-boyfriend, such as in a sauna in a foreign capital. A sauna of the clothes-free variety, at that. Awkward doesn’t really cover it.

Yet there I was, happily steaming away with some girlfriends on a recent jaunt in a liberal European capital, when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted my ex.

It was the quickest of glimpses: a naked sauna is not the place for lingering looks. And this one was all Zen lowlighting, with steam affecting my optics, not to mention a touch of light-headedness from the woozy heatrush. But it was enough for instant recognition: I was thousands of miles from home, but not two feet away from me, my ex-boyfriend was sitting pretty in his birthday suit. And I, discernibly post-Christmas, in mine.

It presented what in retrospect and with distance I can describe as an interesting conundrum: when one is déshabillé in a sauna, is it considered best practice to approach one’s similarly starkers ex and shake his hand while averting the gaze, or should one pretend not to notice him at all, maintaining the illusion of anonymity along with a modicum of dignity, and slip discretely out?

Of course, I chose none of the above, and sat there among the draped bodies of unfazed continentals like an emperor made suddenly aware of his nakedness. I knew I couldn’t go and talk to him. We hadn’t exactly kept in touch, and had both counted against a naked, sweat-dripping reacquaintance when we’d parted ways some years ago.

I could only ignore him, while the sweat made puddles at my feet. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw that he was refusing to play the game. Addled by heat and unsure of the etiquette, I asked one of my girlfriends to confirm that a) my ex was sitting over my left shoulder in the nip and b) he had clocked me. She darted a surreptitious look at His Nakedness, but the fact that he was now looking in our direction kind of put her off her stride. She was naked, too, after all. I could see nothing for it but to make for the showers. Which, as it turned out, were communal. There is no place for a woman with a past in certain European saunas.

I wrapped my towel about me in a manner that I hoped conveyed something between repressed and, well, naked, and took a seat in the Zen garden. To which my former paramour followed me, strolling forwards until his proximity made him impossible to ignore, and I raised my gaze to meet the face of a man that – although he really did look a lot like my ex – was definitely not my ex after all. What relief, you might think, but now my not-ex was a man strolling in my direction without any clothes on, operating on the logical assumption that I’d been checking him out in the sauna.

I’m pretty sure I broke the sound barrier in my sprint from recliner to changing room. Also communal. But be the hokey I was out of there in seconds flat, clothed – nay, shrouded – and hiding in the reception like a repressed Paddy until my friends appeared.

I am not a person much given to resolve, and the turn of a calendar year doesn’t usually change that. Yet the joy of Christmas excess and the constant effort of keeping up appearances had me hovering on the verge of a brand new life philosophy as I saw out 2009. Thus my new year’s resolution was to let myself go. After all, now that I am married, it is apparently what’s expected, and who am I to fly in the face of societal mores?

Yet all it takes is one naked case of mistaken identity in a sauna to remind you why diet and exercise should not necessarily be thrown out with the bathwater, just because every Tom, Dick and Harry is suddenly devoted to gyms and cockamamie detoxes. It’s bad enough to be naked in a sauna with your ex, but woe betide those who end up naked in a sauna with an ex just after they’ve decided to let themselves go.

So my one near-resolution of 2010 is already undone and I have recommitted myself to running and (at least some level of) personal grooming. After all, no matter how far into the future you get, your past still follows you everywhere. Even into the sauna. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure.

fionamccann@irishtimes.com