"Fat to Fittie"

Before I start, lets deal with the elephant in the room, yes, that’s me in the pic, albeit 25 years ago when I was a bit closer to being the fittie I’m striving for now. You might also be thinking why did I get my arse out dressed as a roman soldier and the answer is in the title of this blog. In the name of raising money people do many things, nothing is off limits, or deemed as going too far, as long as the end result ends in raising a pot of cash for a good cause. In recent years the semi naked calendar has proved to be very popular and seemed to all start with the women’s institute from the village of Kettlewell in the Yorkshire dales. They raised thousands of pounds from arty pictures of themselves, naked with sunflowers covering the naughty bits, from this beginning, many jumped on board with their own risqué calendar’s in the hope of making money for a deserving cause.

I’m not quite sure what mine was in aid of, nor do I know what happened to it, as you can see though, I was deemed to be Mr January. The day the pictures were taken was very strange, loads of guys turned up, along with partners and kids, my own two boys were there as well, hopefully they weren’t scarred too much with the images they witnessed. Nobody seemed to care as we all stripped off, luckily there were no camera phones then, but I remember many of the women taking pics with small instamatic cameras. The theme was obviously roman and we used a re-constructed bathhouse in a museum, thankfully the heating worked as many posed gatherings involved bathing in the water. I often wonder what happened to all the images taken by the voyeurs who tagged along, I’d like to think they’ve long since disappeared and not likely to surface on some gay fetish site under the heading “Maximus Gluteus and Minimus Peniculus”.

I hope that whatever the cause we did it for raised a decent amount of money, it certainly raised a few eyebrows, that’s for sure, especially when I lent my camera to a lady I worked with. A few weeks before the shoot, I decided to have a bit of a practise and a girlfriend took pictures, trying out different poses, I had no idea that these images were still on it and only found out a few months later when a guy I knew told me. The woman had asked him to upload the photo’s she’d taken, onto the computer and on doing so, he found mine. I’d kept wondering why her cheeks went red when she spoke to me, now I knew, guess this damaged her for life. The problem was though she didn’t know about the calendar, it was going on sale in a different part of the country, so no-one in my home town ever knew about it, due to my work in tourism I thought this would be a good idea. She must have thought I was a strange pervert who liked dressing in roman armour while his partner took pictures, the thing is, not all of them were from the rear. I’d like to think she’s reading this and accepts my apology for the trauma I caused and also now understands, it was all for charity, so that makes it okay.