Sunshine

23 Feb 2010

“You might call it ultra-violet radiation; it's only sunlight.” Lloyd Cole.

I'm being taunted by this one. It's amazing how long ago a visit to Australia can seem only about six weeks after leaving, but even though I missed all the snow (with perfect timing: there were just a few attempts by Gatwick staff to blend Inuit and Aztec cultures by building little pyramids of snow all over the place when I landed) it still seems as though Phil the Groundhog definitely saw a shadow.

It'll be March soon, and there's half a chance that Spring will actually happen, though I'm starting to look out for signs of fauns and talking wolf police, because this cold spell is beginning to worry me. I think Tilda Swinton may be involved somewhere.

But should I be looking forward to sunshine? Isn't it just going to kill me? Perhaps rather than over-exposed to the sun I've just been overexposed to Australia, where making up scary adverts about sun damage is one of the major employers and a powerful contributor towards their GDP (the trams in Melbourne carry warnings about spending even 10 mins in the sun leading to massively increased risk of your skin turning into something that looks a bit like the surface of an overcooked lasagne and killing you. Damn, I'm stuck on a Melbourne street with no shade and I have to be somewhere more than 10 minutes away! I'm terrified, what can I do? I know! I'll get a tram! Kerching!). The result has been over the last few years that I'm so pale I regularly get mistaken for Gollum.

However, I'm also told that if I don't get enough sunlight, my bones will break and I'll die of prostate cancer. Yay! This is because Vitamin D (again apparently, I'm not medical man) helps protect against prostate cancer and helps the absorption of calcium, and can only be generated in enough quantities to do this by regular and fairly prolonged exposure to the same yellow balminess that's going to cause Doctors to flay you alive for your own protection.

There's even a conspiracy theory that the benefits of sunlight are being downplayed by the firms behind suncream, since (despite what Baz Luhrman says) sunscreen also blocks out all the lovely helpful bits of sunlight, meaning that if you're covered in the shite you may as well go and throw yourself into a combined harvester right now, because you're destined to die horribly. But you'll do that anyway when the end of your nose turns rogue and eats your brain.

Confused? Bloody hell. Winter. Isn't it lovely?