Tag: Sunbeds

Questions

The more perceptive amongst you (let’s be honest here, in comparison to me, all  of you) will have realised that I have been away for nearly three weeks now.  This is the first post I have actually settled down to write while I’ve been on holiday (although I’ll be back by now – you know how it works).  You will get something that comes as close to a travelogue as I can muster over the next few days, but for now I’d like really to just take a little look at the general logistics of holiday-making in general.  You see, I have so many questions…

We live alone and so have three bedrooms that, except for when we have visitors, are unoccupied for most of the year.  I find it very difficult to understand why we need to clean-sheet all of the beds before we go away.  Does my wife want to ensure that, should we be burgled in our absence, the felons will have somewhere clean to rest from their toils and a nice fresh pillowcase in which to transport the loot?  I have tried to ask, but the answer, in the form of an extended dismayed stare, is not one that readily translates into manspeak.

I also do not understand why, for weeks before we travel, the cases have to fill with more toiletries and medications than the storeroom at Boots.  By the time we are ready to actually pack, we cannot fit the clothes in and I cannot lift the bloody things.  “We won’t have to carry most of it back,” says my wife, perfectly aware that whilst away I will use the hotel-provided gels and potions, and return with half of what we are taking intact.  Sun cream disappears from bottles, but merely soaks into clothes which, like myself, weigh twice as much for the return journey.  The one great consolation of a beach holiday is the realisation that most people I encounter have bodies at a similar degree of decrepitude to my own…

In a world full of questions, those related most directly to holidays are amongst the most difficult address.  Why, for instance, does my wife, knowing that we get fresh, clean towels every day, insist that I use her wet one to dry myself after a shower as ‘there is no point in getting them both wet’?  I struggle to think of too many other uses for a fresh, dry towel.  And why is a sunbed in exactly the right position until my wife lays on it, when it is in exactly the wrong one: too shaded, too sunny, too close to the pool, too far away from the pool, millimetrically misaligned to the compass?  Why is the SPF of a suncream always the wrong one?  Most puzzling of all, why does my wife object quite so strongly to me cleaning my teeth naked with the bathroom door open?

I suppose that some things about holidays I am destined never to understand…

Why do we never get an answer when we’re knocking at the door
With a thousand million questions about hate and death and war?… Questions – The Moody Blues (Hayward)

The Writing is in the Sand

mauritius

Just in case you joined me here a couple of days ago, yes, that was my writing in the sand. Yes, those are my feet. And yes, they really are that colour. Being ginger, I have the kind of skin that goes from deathly white to cherry red in seconds. I have the kind of dermis that no currently available lotion can protect from the sun’s rays, unless it is applied with a trowel. I have the kind of hide that sloughs like a snake if I do not have a trowel and a family tub of factor 90 to hand. Trouble is, every now and then, I feel the need to make the sun’s acquaintance. Once a year, as long as I am able, I take a few days sunny sabbatical and make the supreme effort to turn off from my normal day-to-day concerns. Of course, during that time, I do develop a whole new set of worries: did I turn the hob off; did I lock the door; did I take the over-ripe banana out of the fruit bowl? And – as the holiday progresses – will any of my clothes still fit me when I get home; will my liver survive another seven days; is it too early in the year for my conk to be the colour of Rudolph’s?

As I write this, I am laid (laying, lying?) beneath a big reed-topped umbrella. I am looking out at my place in the sun from my place in the shade. (When I say ‘my place’, it is not actually my place: it is somebody else’s place. I have merely hired a little piece of it for a few days.) I am enjoying the opportunity to look out at the sunshine whilst my worries are washed away on a tide of optimism and gin. Soon enough they will return on a tsunami of reality and milky tea, leaving my newly found hopes and aspirations flapping helplessly on the rocks as the tide recedes.

For now, my hopes consist of finishing the bloody crossword and my aspirations amount to no more than being able to move the sunbed around quickly enough to keep it in the shade and me on the right side of medium-well done.

And hovering over me now, the terrible realities of actually taking a holiday at this time of year. The issue of coming home to find that autumn has thrown in its hat and decided to become winter overnight and that, in my absence, miserable, interminable rain has been replaced by miserable, interminable icy rain. Faced with the cold, my skin, displaying an unforgivable lack of imagination, turns red and sore.

So, you must forgive me but, for as long as I am able, I will enjoy my little circle of shade in the sun, knowing that by the time I get internet reliable enough to post this, I shall be home, perhaps one shade pinker than when I left; perhaps two or three novels richer in knowledge and five or six days short of discovering the true horror that is my credit card account. I shall be back at work obeying the proprietorial whim of my employer in order to adequately accommodate the fiscal realities of my existence – and I shall already be saving for next year’s few days in the shade.

The writing is in the sand…

When you are a ginger, life is pretty hard
Years of ritual bullying in the school yard
Kids calling you “ranga” and “Fanta pants”
No invitation to the high school dance  – ‘Prejudice’ (Tim Minchin) – This is brilliant.  Follow the link and bathe in it!