And not public spaces.

I used to live in Berlin where nudism is popular. One could go for a Sunday stroll in the Tiergarten, the heavily wooded park in the middle of the city, and wander innocently into a clearing in the trees to be greeted by the wobbling flesh of grown naked men and women playing frisbee.

Whatever boosts your booster, I suppose - but it's not for me.

You never quite knew what you'd see dangling in the dingle.

Some naked men engage in Ancient Greek wrestling there. "If you want to try something more ancient, how about naked oil wrestling?" one of the "active naturists" suggests on their website.

Nice of you to ask, but I think I'll give it a miss this week.

"As I had very little experience in wrestling, it was more of a lesson for me," the modern Ancient Greek wrestler explained, "but the very slippery aspect of oil wrestling was new."

I expect it was. It would be to me, though perhaps not to him.

The thing is that the human body is often not as elegant as we imagine it to be. It tends to sag and slip with age. Can there be anything more ridiculous than the male body once the lard takes over? All those bits and bumps.

Only in my imagination am I Leonardo DiCaprio. Only in my partner's imagination (and perhaps mine) is she Nicole Kidman. And that's fine, but let us leave it there in our imaginations - in the bedroom.

One thing I should add, and that is that bedroom nakedness needs to be total. There is a British Labour politician who will only be remembered because he kept his socks on during bedroom activity, according to his lover. "Sock Horror. Dressed to thrill" was the headline.

It's been said that the most powerful sex organ is actually the brain, and that is true. It enables us to fantasise that we and our partner are toned athletes when we know that we are really, well, who we are: ageing human beings with loves and lusts - and sags and bulges. Public nakedness rips the covering off our fantasies. It is too much information.

But I forgive the 250 or so naked people who took off their clothes at dawn on Monday and swam in Lake Burley Griffin. They bared themselves to raise money for the Lifeline mental health charity so that's OK.

But they did illustrate the other great argument against non-bedroom nudity: it's bloody cold here.

Or bloody hot. This country is not suited to clotheslessness. The sun burns in summer and freezes the balls off a brass monkey in winter.

And that's the way it is meant to be in the capital. The site for Canberra was chosen precisely because it wouldn't be too comfortable. At the end of the 19th century, the NSW Commissioner Alexander Oliver searched high and low for a suitable site for the capital.

What was needed, he felt, was "a bracing, recuperative climate" with "pure bracing mountain air".

"Bracing!" - code for cold and uncomfortable.

I hate to say this but there is a bit of puritanism to Australia - all that Scottish Presbyterian miserableness plus Catholic guilt, imported from Europe.

We may be cold but there is virtue in our suffering, or so we like to think.

In Old South Wales, I was certainly brought up on the idea that if something is too pleasant, it probably can't be good for you. Cream was bad. Swimming in the biting Atlantic, on the other hand, was, well, "bracing". These days, my nephew and nieces wear wetsuits and I view that as cheating.

But it's still better than going around in public with nothing on. It's not that I'm a prude. It's just that some things are best done in private, like in a bedroom.

Or in the back of a father's Rover 2000, parked on a sand dune overlooking the bracing Atlantic, at the age of 17, only the moon to shine a light on our young nakedness. Socks off.