Confessions of a tanorexic

In an interesting piece for Air Mail, Linda Wells writes of ‘The secret lives of tanorexics’, asking: ‘What drives these bronze obsessives – and why won’t they ever learn?’ She questions her sun-baked friends about why they are so intent on doing a thing which they are warned will ruin their complexions and make it more likely that they get cancer – and doesn’t get a satisfactory answer from any of them. Reading it, I realised that I too am a tanorexic.

It kind of creeps up on you over the years, like any other bad habit: one minute you’re having a harmless half-hour in a sun-trap pub garden in Hove and the next your hair’s falling out in Crete, as happened to me when I failed to wear a sun hat in July some years back. But like Linda Wells’s friends, I won’t be giving up my nasty habit any time soon – even though I don’t believe that actual addiction exists and quit cocaine overnight after three decades bang on it.

Once I was the epitome of the pale-and-interesting type; now the main event of summer for me is tanning. As an adolescent bookworm, the summer was little more than an annoyance designed to intrude on my twin aims of reading my way through the entire canon of unsuitable books and admiring the exquisite view in the looking glass. Would Dorothy Parker ever do anything as humdrum as sunbathe? For the full six weeks of the school summer holiday in my bedroom with the curtains firmly closed, occasionally I would take my nose out of a pretentious turn-of-the-century novel long enough to poke it through the drawn drapes and press it against the sizzling windowpane to stare at the sun: ‘Make it go away!’

Then punk came calling and at 17 I left my bedroom to become a reporter; I wasn’t keen on the music, but John Lydon was so pale he made David Bowie look like David Dickinson. Throughout the rest of my teens I became ever thinner and paler to the extent that my mother cried when I went home, believing me to be a junkie. There’s a photograph of me at this time wearing a leather jacket on the roof of the NME building; I’m so pale I’m practically translucent.

In my twenties, things began to change. Married alive in a no-horse town, I began mutinously to yearn for any kind of life that wasn’t mine. Getting a suntan seemed one of the simplest routes to transformation, but it was a cloudy May. There were these new-fangled tanning pills on the market which you could buy over the counter at Boots; ever the excess-lover, I took three times the recommended dose, went bright orange and had to stay inside throughout the subsequent flaming June, having no access to a private garden and being unwilling to face the public hilarity which had greeted my first walk along the high street in my altered state.

Escaping back to London in the sexy-greedy 1980s there simply wasn’t time to even think about getting a tan; if you were a cute young hack back then, your one life contained enough fun for nine lifetimes, thus we rarely took holidays. But then in my thirties, halfway up the 1990s, I moved to Brighton – and all bets on a permanent pallor were off as my life as a sun-worshipper, beach-bum and water-baby began.

In London, when the sun shows its face, people pack like sardines on to the parched grass of the parks, or risk dysentery, meningitis and legionella from taking a dip in the Thames when it all gets too much. The capital’s ever-dwindling lidos are beautiful, but during school holidays unattractive as every last little Maeve and Finn – wearing all-covering bodysuits or positively incandescent with factor 50 sunscreen – is instructed by their neurotic parents on exactly how to behave around the yellow demon in the sky, their entitled tones altogether ruining the fun-loving atmosphere a lido needs. It’s different in Brighton. When the sun shines and the temperature rises, the other Two Nations schism alongside rich and poor and north and south becomes illuminated. Then landlocked Britain closes in on its captives; coastal Britain opens up, giving the experience of living on the edge of our island a vertiginous shimmer which feels very much like freedom.

But when I moved here, I wasn’t just interested in parochial sunbathing; filthy rich and newly in love, my paramour and I trotted all over chasing the five-star sun. Once I went on a ten-day tanning holiday to Tenerife as I didn’t want to be pale for my main holiday in Mauritius the following month. Now, though – much as with cocaine – I’ve had enough holidays. When Brighton was in lockdown I fell in love with it all over again. It’s the only economy I care to stimulate – and the only place I need to tan.

Though the press photographs show the beach rammed on hot weekends, we have five miles of coastline where you can always find somewhere to be alone, if that’s how you like it. While I prefer to get there early, I love the feeling of communality as the beach slowly fills up with mature mahogany baskers, bronzed young beauties of both sexes, ever-enthusiastic dogs – and yes, even a few moderately excitable Maeves and Finns add to the mix. I’m not that weird type of Brighton resident who came from somewhere duller to live in a lively, hedonistic seaside town only to spend a good deal of their time complaining about the lively hedonism of their chosen home. Excellent sunbathing may also be had at our local lido in Saltdean, now restored to Art Deco glory after years in the wilderness. If you go to the theatre or to football, you can get a better seat by having more money or by knowing the right people – but at a lido, wherever you lay your towel, that’s your home. Lidos are both opulent and socialistic, encouraging atomised individuals by the hundred to find pleasure by merging into one faceless, sun-worshipping mob for a while.

Why do I love the summer in general and mindless tanning in particular when I once loathed it? Not liking the sun is a very adolescent thing – it goes with the freshly-discovered The Wonder Of Me years and that feeling of being Very Very Special. I love all seasons; I’m not one of those misery-buckets who claim that Seasonal Affective Disorder makes them unable to work for a living. But there’s something which appeals to the snobbish loner in spring, autumn and winter; summer reminds us that we are animals – and pack animals at that, unless we are to surrender willingly to the loneliness epidemic.

Yes, I know that tanning comes with a warning, but we all turn up our toes sometime. I don’t smoke or do drugs or indulge in dangerous sports and I didn’t get sunburned until I was 35, so I’m going to stick with my chosen vice. As Kingsley Amis put it: ‘No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.’ Besides, there are so many benefits from this blameless, shameless star 93 million miles away that everything on Earth turns to face it.

Becoming a tanorexic has taught me about myself; about the plasticity of the brain and that we don’t have to be the same way forever just because something seemed clever at 15. Habits which once seemed to open up the world can shrink it down into a rat-run as the decades pass by and you stay indoors dreaming of leaving. If you really are interesting, you don’t need to be pale to prove the point; if you need to sneer at the sunbathing hordes on Brighton beach to make yourself feel special, you’re probably profoundly dull. I choose the tired, poor huddled masses yearning to catch rays every time because as F. Scott Fitzgerald said of America itself – the first country where the haves sunbathed in order to look more like the have-nots – sun-tanning is ‘a willingness of the heart’.