Sunscreen

Damn those early mornings. The last one was Saturday and I’m still jet-lagged. Last night I conked out before the whisky was finshed! Gradually re-acclimatising.

Resignation letter is written. I will leave it at work tomorrow and send a copy by Email tomorrow night. I anticipate pleading followed by rage followed by telling everyone I’m no use anyway. That’s how it goes when someone resigns. She is going on holiday with her husband who also works for the company from this weekend. Note that there was never any question of that particular holiday being cancelled due to short-staffing. This will ruin her holiday. Watch me not care.

A realisation has dawned. If I am ever going to make a living as a writer I have to give myself no other choice. Writers are masters of procrastination. As long as the bills are paid we will diddle around with half-formed ideas and not concentrate on any one thing. It has to be Writer or Not Writer. There is no Writer-ish.

And so I return, gradually, to comfortable nocturnality. No need for sunscreen in my world. I have none in the house. I do have skin moisturiser since the incident with the chemicals just over a year ago, and I have Germolene which cures everything but that’s it. No sunscreen.

I would never trust myself to make a lotion out of strange concoctions found on the Internet and then rub it all over myself. It would end with scales, antennae and a tail, knowing my luck. Yet many people are now doing this.

There’s no need. As a child, if you could get hold of Factor 10 sunscreen you were at the cutting edge of sun protection and were pretty much using white emulsion paint. Now it goes up to Factor Holy Crap which I suppose must be like painting yourself invisible since no light can possibly reach you at all. Yet thousands of farm workers down the ages have never used any sunscreen, despite having jobs that keep them outside all day. During harvest time they’d be out in the sun from the time it rose to the time it set. They’d get every single ray. Is there a massive contribution from farm workers to the skin cancer figures?

No, it’s the silly buggers who spend 50 weeks of the year in an office or in front of the TV, then two weeks in a place hundreds of miles nearer to the sun than they’ve ever been before. They spend those two weeks lying about on beaches, trying to persuade their bodies to produce melanin in a matter of hours when it’s been out of the sun so long it’s forgotten what melanin is made of. That’s where the skin cancer figures come from.

Last time I was burned was quite recent. I went fishing for three hours on a very sunny day. A terrible idea. Since fish can’t close their eyes, they hide at the bottom when it’s really sunny. Also, warm water holds less oxygen than cold water so fish are avoiding too much activity when it’s hot. In hot and sunny conditions, fishing is a waste of time.

Also painful. It took just three hours to burn my face to the point where the cracks bled. This helps reinforce my conviction that nocturnality is natural. It also allowed me to explain at work that the horribleness of my face was because I failed to get back in my coffin before sunrise.

Even so, no sunscreen for me. I prefer to avoid the sun altogether. When I go out to smoke I do it in the shade because sunlight gives you cancer. Try telling the drones that one. The discordancy makes their eyes melt.

Well, knackerdness has caught up again. Later this time. I’m adapting to a real life again. This week Mopman is covering Gadget’s second week of holiday. He wasn’t supposed to be but he got railroaded into it as I was for the first week. No wonder he is also looking for another job – he now has two interviews lined up.

So I leave you tonight with a song (well, a sort of talking to music really) that amused me when it appeared many years ago. Maybe I still have the CD-single somewhere.

 

 

I like this YouTube version because it says it has English subtitles but doesn’t, and because the ‘about’ tag has a bit of history in it.