[winston optic beer]

Almost twenty years ago, my wife and I participated in a large scale Spencer Tunick event in a city centre mainly beside the river.

I'd told her about the event, never imagining she'd be prepared to do it herself. She surprised me by saying that she was well up for it.

In the build up, my wife assured a young terrified aisan girl that it would be fine. We stripped off the car park and spent a couple of hours naked walking between and posing at various places on either side of the river. My wife was pissed because it was cold and we were only expecting to be naked for a few minures when posing.

It was early in the morning, so there weren't many spectators. Every now and again, there'd be the odd person looking out of upstairs windows. At one point, I heard some giggling boys hiding above us on a bridge

There were some surreal moments, like over a thousand naked people trooping past a party of wide eyed tourists with luggage outside a hotel waiting for their bus. Also, a couple of fully clothed revellers leftover from the previous night snogging passionately against a wall. I guess they just got turned on by the sight of so many naked people. Another, when an unsuspecting woman came out of her flat to go presumably to work and found herself standing fully dressed in a sea of naked people crouched on the ground. Most weird of all was walking past a line of grinning policemen liiining the route at one point.

We carefully avoided the TV cameras and kept to the back of the crowd when posing for photos. For some reason my wife didn't want her parents to see me, her husband in the nude - she was not at all bothered about them seeing her that way. I regretted this when I saw the final photographs at a gallery.

We'd taken some friends with us to see the exhibition. I felt a little sad that our friends couldn't see us full frontal nude amongst the life sized images of the brave ones standing up front. You only get one oppotunity to do something like this, best to make a good job of it.

A crowd of people overhead my wife talking about posing. When they realised she'd posed nude they treated her like a celebrity and kept her for ages answering their questions about it. It was a shame they couldn't have seen her naked image. That would have made everybody's day.