N – Nutty Slack a tale of nudity, naturism and coal – oh and town planning – Nail Your Colours to the Mast…

My partner and I used to be Naturists when we lived further south in the UK and when climate change had not yet started to put the reliability of seasonal weather into a blender!

In the village of Brickett Wood, in the heart of London’s Green Belt and near to the M25 motorway, there are no less than three nudist or naturist camps. It is due to a founding principle of the Green Belt, set up after WW11,  that the only thing which you can get planning permission for, is a caravan park and hence London is ringed with naturist or nudist caravan parks where those of the persuasion go for holidays or weekends in the buff – just as we used to do, living nearby. Nudism and Naturism camps differ slightly, in the former, nudity is de rigeur, whilst in the latter, it was optional except in the swimming pool otherwise the club would have been overrun with people joining just to use the pool. In any case, the pool was one end of the social hub at our club – Fiveacres Country Club – the bar being the other – we were pool people!

In fact, the oldest club in the UK was one of the other nudist clubs, called Spielplatz (German for playground) and just a week or so ago, I read in the Guardian newspaper about a protest by bare-breasted women in Berlin to campaign for the equal right of both men and women to go topless in public spaces and swimming venues in particular. Apparently, there is a long tradition going back about a hundred years in Berlin – yes The Roaring Twenties when “anything goes” and it is called Freikörperkultur  which translates as “free body culture” and so I guess the founders of Spielplatz were exponents of this movement – taking root in a generally prudish Britain…

And so to Nutty Slack! You see until I joined Fiveacres, I imagined Naturists to have stepped from the pages of the magazine “Health and Efficiency” which was full of svelte young things frolicking on beaches – but, I discovered, probably models rather than bona fide naturists.

Chatting by the pool under a blazing sun, to another member, I expressed the view that the members were nothing like those in the magazine. “No!” he said “Plumbers, plasterers and loads of nutty slack!” Now I had heard that expression and kind of understood his usage, but I had no idea of the origin – which is why it qualifies for this year’s A to Z theme!

Now the origins I have “dug up” (you will soon see how apposite that phrase is) from the web, go part of the way to explaining nutty slack as “Poor quality coal – a mixture of dust and small ‘nuts’ of coal -of such poor quality that post-war rationing did not apply to it.”. I say part of the way because I will now draw on half of my degree course – Geology – to explain nutty slack fully. Imagine Europe in the Carboniferous geological age – the course of the great River Rhine has long been established – draining northern central Europe including the area where devotees of Freikörperkultur would one day gambol. Britain lay in the delta of this river and as sea levels ros and fell, the process of coal formation occurred. First, enormous rain forests would flourish on the banks and islands of the delta – Amazon size trees whose diminutive descendants are the tough weed Equisetum or Mare’s Tail hated by all gardeners and alottmenteers. Then a rise in sea level would kill the forest with salt water and all the trees would keel over (another sailor’s term) and be buried by the sediments of the mighty river. Sea level would fall and the trees would grow again. This happened many times and eventually the many alternating layers of tree and sediment, compressed over millions of years with the wood fossilising into coal. These coal deposits were to fuel the industrial revolution of first Britain and then the rest of Europe.

Nutty Slack, is dug from the upper and lower boundaries of the coal where a mixture of thin seams of coal alternate with shales and the resulting mixture burns, leaving non-combustible chunks of shale behind – so a poor quality of partial fuel. Although perhaps good for keeping a fire going overnight I suspect.

The reason that this peculiarly British phrase has languished from memory is a combination of Margaret Thatcher killing the mining industry in order to break the power of the unions, and the advent of smokeless fuels to prevent air pollution and so our memory of coal fires had died like a grate full of nutty slack…

As to my fellow naturist and his description of the other incumbents of Five Acres – he meant that the various middle-aged bodies on display bore more than a passing resemblance to a sackful of nutty slack – all lumpy and bumpy…

Nailing Your Colours to the Mast is another sailor’s term – from fighting ships. You may remember False Flags under the “F” post and how it was necessary to reveal and fight under your true colours, well a fight would be ended when one side “stuck their colours” – lowered their flags in surrender. However, if facing overwhelming odds and having the determination to fight until the bitter end, a ship might nail it’s colours to the mast so that they cannot be struck – no surrender…

Today, we tend to use the expression “Nailing your Colours to the Mast” in the sense of declaring your views, or making a mission statement, but the original meaning has a sense of desperate commitment “Come Hell or High Water…”

We have three Cant languages from the Wikipedia article today

• Nadsat, a fictional argot
• Nihali, from India
• Nyōbō kotoba, from Japan