Greetings, as you may or may not be aware, (probably not because nobody ever actually reads this bloody thing) I recently did something I hadn't done for almost ten years.
I went on holiday.
Granted I had no say in the matter, I had to miss LFCC as a result, and my Nan having a mini-stroke the day we were due to fly out notwithstanding, but like most things it got me thinking.
Firstly, whenever I told people I was going on holiday, or had had been on holiday, everyone kept saying the same thing: 'Ooh, I've always wanted to go there.' Well, it's not exactly that bloody difficult. if you want to spend a week basking in sulphur and riding around on a camel with hair like Toyah Wilcox, and you've always wanted to know what Hake tastes like, you just go to an airport and get on a plane.
The fact is though, you go on holiday because you want to come back with a suntan. Because if you don't all your friends will think you haven't gone away anywhere at all. This might lead them to either suspect a) you're a vampire, or b) poor, which, if I'd gone to LFCC instead, I would have been.
So instead, you went to Birmingham International, where you were herded onto some godforsaken tin cigar that whisked you away to the Canary Islands, where you spent a week bathing in chlorine, avoiding projectiles from the immature idiots in the pool and occasionally venturing out to a restaurant with plastic chairs.
But it didn't matter because you came home with what you think is a tan but instead turned out to be a series of pink and white stripes. You aimed to be a bronzed Adonis like Christiano Ronaldo, but ended up looking like something the butcher hangs up in his shop window with a label reading 'offer of the week' jammed up it's arse.
And less than two weeks later, it's all gone, and now you're peeling and shedding skin to such an extent you could be forgiven to think you've turned into a snake. You have therefore spent a month's wages for something that lasted about as long as an X-Factor winner's career.
The history of the suntan is in itself an interesting one. In the olden days, any one with bronzed skin worked out in the fields, whilst those that lived in towns and cities saw about as much sunlight as Nosferatu due to all the inner city smog. Even the upper classes, who were responsible for inventing the seaside holiday in the first place, would often venture out onto the beach wearing what would pass for a pretty decent pair of pyjamas.
Then, one day in 1923, Coco Chanel stepped off a yacht in the south of France, sporting the full David Dickinson leatherman look, and a new craze was born.
The Americans took note and began to appear on the world stage, after developing burgers and cars with fins, and everyone else copied them because they thought it looked cool. So, when the package holiday was invented, every fine upstanding Englishman had the opportunity to look like the bastard offspring of George Hamilton and Micheal Winner.
Not me though. I am well aware I have the complexion of forced rhubarb and I am simply not equipped to spend more than five minutes with the glare of the sun on my ugly, piggy, pasty, overweight frame and spend all summer long dashing from tree to tree. if anything, because a bottle of sunscreen theses days costs more than a bottle of cheap Spanish wine and for me that is simply unacceptable.
If you go for cream rather than lotion, it often comes thicker than wallpaper paste and I really don't have time to waste on weather or not I should go for factor 30 or 50, because either way I panic I've forgotten some random exposed area that gets burned anyway and will keep me up all night wriggling until my bedsheets cocoon me into a linen maggot.
Usually my knees and ankles.
I learned early on in my foreign excursions that's it's much better and safer to bathe in it, then sit in the shade reading my book and listening to music all day. Mind you, if you have children, you obviously have to spend an unreasonable amount of time smothering them in the stuff as well. I told my sister just to get my nephew a frogman suit and let him get on with it.
Not my mother, though, oh no. She will spend the best part of half an hour applying what looks like Castrol GTX to her skin and then, using the kind of careful alignment that would make Jordrell Bank wince, arranges a sun lounger so that she need not move all day. She just lies there like a roast potato, basting. The effect though, I must say, is astonishing, she goes from a middle aged woman to a little brown Yoda, and then two weeks later, she turns back again.
As for me, I kept surrounding myself with as many parasols a possible and arranging my sun lounger so that thanks to my new prescription sunglasses, I could keep my eye on a stunning pale-skinned girl in an orange bikini who I developed something of an obsession with.
She had the face, hair and body of Karen Gillian, only with the added bonus of quite possibly the most incredible pair of breasts I think I have ever seen on a human woman in my life. They were not silicone monsters, they were totally natural, perfectly shaped and to my eye, cute. They were in proportion to her body with a cleavage that was contained and well defined, not spreading and stretched.
It was possible to glimpse them even from behind her when she way lying down and I made this the main focus of my day until the battery in my iPod ran out. She walked without shame or false modesty, her dark ginger hair wrapped up neatly above her head, knowing she was beautiful to the eye, sleek with a slender frame.
Combined with that graceful walk and a bottom that danced like two Volkswagen Beetles trying to parallel park, there were a couple of occasions where she walked right past me in the poolside bar, her breasts almost acting as weather balloons, and I damn well nearly dropped my drink.
Naturally like the complete and total coward that I am, I never approached her or talked to her and instead thought about pulling a pneumatic 21-year old blonde in the other bar with the strappy sports top and jogging bottoms with the word 'juicy' written across her bum. That never happened either.
Anyway, if you want to get a tan, get a job mending the roads.
Next year I'm going back to LFCC.