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Jayne Dawson: The two-tone ritual
BY the time you read this, it will probably be raining again. The sun has retired exhausted after shining on us with shrieking, hysterical force and all is normal again – but no matter, it's still the start of the English two-tone season.
That time of year when people who have previously been a uniform skin colour suddenly break out into patches of a different hue: sometimes they're red, sometimes they're brown but always they are a startling contrast to the bits that are inevitably, assuredly, still white.
It's the obsession with the tan of course. I don't understand it. A tan is so over, so yesterday, so unhealthy, so wrong, but still we can't bear to do a summer in that white-with-a grey-blue-tinge that is so often the hallmark of the indigenous English.
Why is that? I don't want to open the floodgates to bigger, deeper questions or anything, I don't want to start anybody down a path of introspection leading to thoughts that could only end in sobbing, but why can't we learn to love ourselves as we are?
Why, in fact, can't we still believe that a tan is a shameful, common thing, like the Victorians and Edwardians did? A sign of a person who had to (gasp) work for a living, and outside in the fields too.
Just to be clear, I'm not normally on the side of the gentry, being as all my ancestors were, completely and utterly without exception, the kind of people who would have caught deep tans every summer. Unless they were busy catching housemaid's knee or coal miner's lung or going deaf in the mills – that kind of thing.
But I do find myself with the Victorian upper classes on this one issue. Who wants to look like something people are buying on a four-year, no-interest deal from a furniture store?
Because that's what happens if you persist in going brown every summer – there are people all over the city walking around like human leather sofas. Their skin has turned to hide from years of slathering it in oil and cooking it. And if you are muttering about Vitamin D at this point then la, la.....I'm not listening.
An all-over tan at least has that merit, though – it's all over. But mostly, we don't even achieve that.
At the weekend there were people standing outside pubs looking like a warning poster to others. They were topless, that's the men and the women, and their shoulders and necks were being broiled to deep red colour. Just their shoulders and necks mind you. And one arm as they lifted their pint to their lips. it made for a lurid contrast with their tattoos.
If you're going to do that, wouldn't it be better to truly commit and take off the three-quarter length trouser thingies you're wearing as well, or the jeans, or the leggings, or whatever. Just get it all off and turn fire-engine red all over?
As for the drinking beer in the full glare of the sun part – I can only think these people actually want the kind of headache that makes you wish to drill a hole in your own skull, but that's another piece of moral high ground to be scaled another day.
Right now I'm sticking with the horrors of the tan. I say all this and I mean it. My belief that tans are not worth it runs epidermis deep. Except...for feet. Feet are where my commitment to whiteness wavers. There is nothing lovely about stark, white feet, is there? They actually look a bit dead, a bit corpse-like, encased in a summer sandal.
Which is why I join in the two-tone ritual. Loads of we women do, you know. Where men go naturally patchy red, we go unnaturally patchy orange.
It goes like this: we don't want to / can't achieve the natural tan (some of us know this because we once spent two years enduring twice-weekly sessions on a sunbed and never changed colour. You're right. I do wish I hadn't).
So we use the stuff out of a bottle. Only we can't be bothered to do the all-over tan thing, so we just put it on the bits where our tights would normally go. And we do that all summer. We're two-tone for months at a time, and it seems perfectly normal to us.
Or there is the other version of two-tone, more simply known as missed-a-bit, which occurs increasingly as summer goes on and we get more and more bored of applying brown dye to ourselves. This can also take the form of a deeper orangey-brown on the knees or elbows, or palms of the hand, which is evidence we have become bored with the instruction on the back of the bottle to "always exfoliate first" and have missed out that vital step. (Note to chaps: think of it as sandpapering yourself and you're more or less there).
There are many reasons to love an English summer – but the exhausting business of turning yourself two-tone isn't one of them.
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Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 10 C to 25 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: East
