Andrew Kay: Life’s a beach

Pale and interesting or tanned and lovely? That’s the question, or at least it was a few weeks back when I was starting to prepare for our summer holiday.

I’m not a fan of lying around in the sun, I get too hot and too restless. I don’t much like sand either and I find pebbles uncomfortable. Hard to please? Yes, that’s me.

But I did need the break and I did want to simply kick back my heels and relax. A week in Turkey was the solution but Turkey is hot and last time I went I managed to burn a bit of leg by missing a patch when applying the sun block. What I ideally wanted was to be able to lie under an umbrella with my Kindle, a Lemon Fanta and the occasional ice cream. Turkish ice cream is particularly good if a little odd as it has strange elastic qualities. I had a marvellous cherry one when we honeymooned there two years ago and as cherries are now one of the few things I can eat without being crippled I am looking forward to more of the same.

But as usual I digress. The tan, or the lack of one, was the issue. After last year’s dismal summer I am as pale as something that lives under a York stone paving slab. I have the pallor of a ghost which is not helped by my spectral white hair. I could easily get a job on the pier scaring punters on the Ghost Train.

In the past I have opted for sun beds prior to a holiday. Whilst failing to give me that healthy looking Mediterranean glow, they did seem to break the back of the problem and I soon turned a mellow brown in the sun. But these days there are two many folds of flesh and I supect that I would end up with white creases, that and the health risks involved.

A few years after that I decided to go the way of a spray tan. I called my lovely friend Julie at The Lanes Health & Beauty and she made an appointment for me to get a respray. Apparently I was done in the same booth as Katie Price, the only difference being that my man boobs are definitely not implants.

The effects were dramatic. I came out looking fabulous, a rich healthy bronze, not too strong but definitely not the whiter shade of pale that I went in. That day I had to travel to London for the launch of some new product, I forget what. What I will never forget is that as the evening wore on I got warmer and warmer and as I did I got browner and browner. By the end of play I was a fabulous golden brown, a colour Sir Cliff would be proud of or Mr David Dickinson.

I had been warned that this would happen and that the following day, after a cool shower, I would settle down to a nice even colour. Which is exactly what happened and I was delighted that year as I sat in beach bars and cafe’s reading the latest Mann Booker winner without ever having to brave the detrimental rays of the sun.

Being tanned, like being thin, is merely the evidence that the concept of beauty is tryannical. We all pander in our own ways to the notions of what looks good and what does not. Oh I know that some of it is about health, but that’s not what we are being sold. What we are being sold are diets, and thin people’s clothes, and visions of the human form that we need not aspire to.

“To me, getting old seems to be the new staying young”

I’d like to be as slim as I was in 1974, of course I would, and I would like to be tanned with a thick mane of curls again, but it simply isn’t going to happen. I will lose a little weight and that spray tan sounds more and more like a good idea, even if it is only a means of keeping me out of the sun. But other than that I am embracing my weight, my colour and my thinning hair. I have grown to love my hair now it is an even silver colour. To me, getting old seems to be the new staying young.