Opinion

Anita Robinson: You tan if you want to, the scorching sun is not for me

Sunshine  at the sea front, Holywood Co Down. Picture by Mal McCann.
Sunshine at the sea front, Holywood Co Down. Picture by Mal McCann. Sunshine at the sea front, Holywood Co Down. Picture by Mal McCann.

Phew! Scorchio! I have no clothes for this kind of weather. We ‘gingers’ hate it.

Despite the liberal application of all kinds of protective unguents, we do not tan. We blister. We burn. Ten minutes exposure to anything over 16°C and we come indoors with a red raw angry triangle tattooed on our chest and a throbbing headache.

Also, you can nearly hear the sun siphoning the colour out of our expensively tinted hair. What misery for us reared-under-a-jamjar palefaces. Our natural colour is ghostly white with a tinge of green, described by classicists and the more charitable, as ‘alabaster’ – a complexion much desired and admired in an earlier era, but not, alas in this one. The legacy of such exposure is a rash of freckles – charming in small children, but as attractive in adults as age-spots or acne.

It’s considered criminal now to allow children out without skin protection. No such sanction in my day. I had to be daubed with calamine lotion after the damage was done. At self-conscious fourteen I took matters into my own hands and attempted to bleach my freckles away using neat lemon juice. I wouldn’t recommend it.

I was fascinated as a child by elderly men up the country, their faces weatherbeaten to a walnut hue. When they took their caps off, their bald heads shone, bone-white and smooth as eggshells, as did their arms above the elbow. Once, to have a tan, made one instantly identifiable as irredeemably working class.

Tanning only became fashionable in the 1930s when Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor and Coco Chanel kicked over the social traces and the ‘quality’ flocked to roast themselves on the Mediterranean riviera and acquire the same finish as their smartly varnished yachts. Prior to that, it had all been picture-hats and parasols to preserve a porcelain complexion and sea-bathing an uncomfortable exercise undertaken for the benefit of one’s health, indulged in wearing neck-to-ankle wool. Now people are flying abroad, not to explore the history, culture and lifestyle of a foreign country and its citizens, but to hurl themselves into significantly warmer waters wearing post-it sized scraps of fabric secured by parcel twine, then flinging themselves onto the barbeque heat of a beach to kipper themselves completely – probably in the company of their fellow countrymen in a resort whose every facility is specifically designed to make them feel at home. Well, if that’s what floats their boat and their highest priority is an enviable tan, happy days.

Hot weather dressing is a problem in our climate where the days we have it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Synthetic fabrics are sweatily adherent, cottons and linens coolly comfortable, so long as you don’t sit down, when they garner as many creases as a melodeon and you look as if you’ve slept in them. As for male shorts – something sad happens to men’s legs after fifty and the contrast between ruddy faces and pipecleaner-pale lower limbs looks incongruous.

Apropos of nothing, why are both sexes suddenly wearing big, clootery, blinding-white trainers? I thought at first it was just a bad-taste aberration, until I saw celebrities wear them with evening clothes at an awards ceremony. And, Lord save us, a bride! She’ll regret that. Whatever happened to appropriateness and good taste?

I fail to understand the rapture that greeted the recent announcement that alfresco dining was permitted. Never a fan of picnics or barbeques, eating ‘OUT out’ at a proper table on a proper chair, even if your dinner’s cooling more rapidly than you can eat it, while batting away flying insects and noticing threads of rain in the breeze that carries away your paper napkin? No thank you.

Our brief heatwave may be over by the time you read this. You lie out and rotisserie yourself if you wish. I’ll be relaxing indoors in a floor-length kaftan, a wide-brimmed hat and large dark glasses, with the windows open but the blinds half-shut.

If, by the age of fifty, you want a complexion like an old leather handbag – it’s no skin off my nose....