She was sprawled across a public footpath in the middle of Dartmoor like a road-hump and I found myself rather shocked because when did you last see anybody sunbathing in England?

But it was a fine day and the topless bit didn't worry me at all because I am exceptionally cool and assured when presented with strange women's naked breasts, even in England.

Which is saying something, because of course any mature male knows how not to embarrass himself when faced with bronzed topless women on warm fashionable beaches, but pale-breasted women in September, on a moor... really, you would have had to have lived through the late 1960s and early 1970s to be able to handle (by which I meant to say 'cope with' because the last thing this column needs is a descent into smut) naked breasts with any degree of confidence.

That was when pale tofu-reared hippy girls felt obliged to take their clothes off even in blustery weather conditions, when the wind might blow up and create a danger of double entendres.

Hippy boys seldom felt a reciprocal need to take their underpants off, which, although I didn't quite understand the gender politics of it, was unarguably a good thing.

The point (oops) was to treat the naked breast as if it wasn't there at all; this was before women, or perhaps just hippy girls, thought it worthwhile to do breast-enhancement exercises or even resort to surgery – possibly as endorsed by the British Association of Plastic Surgeons (BAPS).

The girls were not asking anybody to admire their breasts or even notice them; they seemed to think, against all the evidence, that their free-thinking ways would release them from pale British conventionality, so they could act as if they belonged to some wild Amazonian tribe, where naked breasts were no surprise at all.

So, although I was only ever on the fringes of hippy-land (actually, I only went hippy in the hope of finding endless free love and drugs, which was one of my first mistakes, particularly on the free-love front), I at least know how to walk past a topless woman on a public footpath without losing my dignity.

The more immediate danger, in this case, was losing my footing. This was on a narrow strip of walkable land between a steep, densely-forested downward slope and a swift-moving stream as clear and bright as a Consulate cigarette.

The path was strewn with stones it would be easy to slip on and one false step on the banks of the roaring torrent could have left me with damp ankles.

Quite clearly, I should have asked the young lady to move, addressing her as 'young lady' so as to emphasise my position as a mature authority figure.

I might also have asked her why, amongst all the acres of Dartmoor, she had chosen to sun her body in a place where any walkers a little too old to be capable of leaping and capering past her might have done themselves a mischief.

But I didn't; naked breasts don't worry me but confident young women behaving badly are scary.