Naked ambition
Or, the lengths you have to go to to promote a book

Yes. I’ve been negligent. Can you blame me? And this is probably a fleeting visit, impelled by an opportunity too good to miss. I’ve been silent for good reasons. Yet another lousy summer has broken my heart, my will and sealed my gob. There’s only so much moaning even I can do about the weather. 3 pants summers in a row, and I admit defeat, and start to wonder if my book, my blog, my very provocative existence in these sunless isles (sunless in summer that is, which, in my rather nostalgic unreasonableness I maintain the outmoded delusion that this might be the proper season for it), is not contributing to the vile weather pattern that has now set in. And so, I’ve stopped blogging a dead horse, and kept schtum.

Why am I breaking cover and radio silence, now? Because, my friends, I’ve been asked to give a talk about my poor book at the British Naturist Association’s annual beano at a leisure complex somewhere in the north of these isles next weekend, and I thought this is something to share with you.

Talking of which, and you are no doubt ahead of me here, what else am I planning to share? It’s a fair question, given, one of the techniques of conquering nerves about public speaking is to ‘imagine the audience naked’. Not very helpful here, given they will be (potentially 400 of them). Do I imagine them clothed, or do I take the plunge myself, and make my first nude appearance since I essayed it as an amateur streaker all them years ago? I have given the matter much thought. At least 2 seconds worth. It would be rude not to.

Watch this space...(no, that one, what are you like?).

Et in Suburbia Ego

The heatwave (the glorious, glorious heatwave, which is only just petering out) has allowed me to open a door I've been itching to unlatch for 2 years now. I wanted to go somewhere special when researching my chapter on Memory. But, as Joni put it, clouds got in the way. This is what I wrote anyway:

"The past is indeed a foreign country. They have much better weather there.

My earliest fully-formed memory: I was four, and supposed to be meeting my mother outside the school gates. She was a few minutes late, and I took the opportunity to sneak into the allotment next door. Strictly out of bounds. But the door was ajar, and the temptation strong. I can still recall the ecstasy of tearing through the sun-drenched groves of sky-high scarlet beans and lavender, chasing cabbage whites that tumbled from my grasp into the impossible blue beyond. Most of all, I recall the sensation of being energized by the sun. A photosynthetic surge that intoxicated me then, and ever since.

I don’t remember how I got out. Maybe an angel with a flaming sword expelled me and shut fast the door; for, on being retrieved, I apparently declared to my frantic mother that what I had found there was ‘paradise’. I stand by that claim. For I must have felt instinctively the transformative power of sunshine. Its alchemical ability to turn the humblest patch of suburban verdure into the Elysian Fields, and how it can preserve and sanctify moments from our pasts. If I didn’t know it then, I certainly know it now, and can view this moment as formative in my heliotropic quest. A version of the oldest journey of all – to get back to the Garden".

And that's exactly what I did, the scorcher finally allowing me to unlock this sensual time capsule, and see if it was still there. I'd fully expected a George Orwell coming up for air, and down to earth, experience of discovering my paradise had been paved over long ago. With good reason. What used to be a hospital right next to the allotment had just become 'des res' apartments as even Thornton Heath near Croydon pretends it's part of London. So maybe my bid to get back to the Garden was just in time. The door was shut this time, and I couldn't see a soul working there through the chainlink fence. I prowled the perimeter, and was ready to frame the the phrases that made a poetic virtue of this disappointing necessity. But then I spotted an amiable looking old cove sweating towards the gate with a bunch of recently unearthed onions. I think he could see on my face that I was telling the truth about why I wanted to be there. And so he let me in. To rove through the dusty tracks of lost time, searching for the gold I had buried long ago.

And it was there. Miraculously and sunnily still there, just as I'd left it almost 40 years ago. I suppose it's not all that surprising that the allotment remained unchanged. That's sort of what they, and nature and stuff are for. Bucolic oases, whose cyclical continuity defy the flux and sprawl of 'progress' beyond their borders. And I'd come at the same time of year (high summer, but still term time), same time of day (home time), and under a scorching sky. The sun did its unique magic, in creating, preserving and restoring this very first memory. The earliest experience, exposed brilliantly on the photographic plate of memory, had left the truest deepest trace.

It's old father sun's day.

It's that time again, the midsummer solstice, which strides up to us with wearisome predictability. Some perversity in the cosmos always decrees that the sun is elsewhere when he should be taking a bow for his longest performance. It means, of course, after this it's all down hill. The nights will start drawing in soon, and before we know it, the ads will start selling Christmas. Yes, I'm back, to bring a little sunshine into everyones lives.

This day presents the opportunity to assess the summer so far, and issue a mid-term appraisal. Now, let me see... It struck me the other day that either I'm softening along with my brain, or this summer hasn't been that bad so far. That bad being another way of saying anything like the last 2. It's all relative, I suppose. A friend who I hadn't seen for a while greeted me the other day with 'you must be pretty miffed with the lousy summer'. And there I was secretly thinking it had been OK. Not wonderful. It's not a proper summer for me until I hear the phrase 'hosepipe ban'. But we have to be thankful for small mercies in this climate, what with the solar credit crunch 'an all. I can say this much for summer 09 so far, Its heart is in the right place. It has, as Wilde once said of nature in general, good intentions. But has difficulty carrying them out. It just needs a bit of encouragement, to get back into its scorcher stride. So, instead of moaning, I'll look on the bright side, and say thank you. Thank you sun, for a miracle of a sunny dry bank holiday in May. Thank you for some good weekends (we'll turn a blind eye to the weeks in between). And thank you for not allowing it to rain that much. We really missed you the last 2 years, and we can see that your trying your best. Three cheers for the sun, and let's have a bloody good scorcher. Huzzah.

BTW, regulars of my romance blog venture might be amused to know I'm giving a talk about my book at Shakespeare & Co in Paris tomorrow. I'm hoping that a long lost lover will turn up, sing me her songs and sweep me off my feet. I'll let you know if it happens... TTFN.

Fair weather friends to meteorology

This story made me laugh. I quote it directly:

Tourist chiefs at a seaside resort have accused the Met Office of losing the town £1 million because it got the weather forecast wrong on Bank Holiday Monday.

Bournemouth in Dorset was supposed to suffer thundery showers, according to the Met Office, but instead it actually had sunshine on the hottest day of the year so far, with temperatures hitting 22 degrees. However, tourism bosses said around 25,000 visitors stayed away from the town because of the "negative" prediction for rain. Mark Smith, head of Bournemouth Council's tourism department, said: "We do suffer badly from inaccurate weather reports. "The forecast was for thundery showers throughout the day but after 9am it remained bright and sunny and was the hottest day of the year so far. "The average amount spent by visitors per head is £41, so even for one day that cost us over a million pounds."

Will these be the same British Tourism bodies that will claim the weather is not important for British tourism, as our country has 'so much more to offer', should we suffer another washout summer? Bournemouth in the rain? I've been there. Don't do it.

Full story at: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20090528/tuk-weather-blunder-sparks-1m-storm-6323e80.html

Time to Cover up? Too late.

As the sun finally comes out in strength, so do the public health messages frightening the living daylight out of us. Cover up is their theme. I find this particularly apt, given the true and shameful history of sunbathing. I tell this story in my book, but I was advised against being too cheeky or controversial by my editor. I also expected a lot more flack when interviewed by radio presenters. But, apart from the first one I encountered when publicising the hardback last year, all of those I've spoken to since have been sweetness and light on the sun safety controversy. It was his very first question, and it completely threw me: 'Why have you written a celebration of sunshine? Aren't we told to get out of it, and to avoid it?'* I think I faffed out some limp riposte, and kicked myself immediately afterwards when I thought of all the clever cutting things I should have said. And I was primed with notes the next time round, but the next time never came.

So, for what's worth, this is what I should have said. Cover up? I'm glad you mentioned that. Let me tell you about the most shameful cover up of all. The very same people who now tell us to get out of the sun, are those who encouraged us to make the most of it in the first place. Sun-bathing was invented, and promoted by public health authorities between the wars, not by the fashion industry that has been allowed to take the rap for it. Slip, slap, slop is their mantra. But they certainly slip up on the facts, slap down the wrong culprits, and are very sloppy in their grasp of history. Read all about it in my fascinating, controversial book (a precis of this story is found in the SunLounge section of my website, here). Incidentally, the photo above is not an early session of the Human League, complete with half-naked junior fan club, but an artificial sunlight clinic from the 1920s, exposing wee nippers to larges doses of UV light. Just proving the young have always been susceptible to the fashionable allure of the sun tan.

But we now know better, don't we. Do we? Why should we trust one set of ‘experts’ telling us to get out of it, when another set not 50 years before threw their equal conviction into telling us to get out into it? Given the sun is the source of all life, it would be odd that this stuff that we’ve been living with for millennia was intrinsically so bad for us. Especially as our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, then agriculturalists. We evolved spending a good deal of time under the elements.

But skin cancer is on the rise, we are told. That's the media simplifying things again. There are a few dermatologists and epidemiologists (the study of health in populations), who are prepared to speak out against the general of the sun being public health enemy no. 1. Looking into it, it would appear that the rise of skin 'cancer', is due to a re-classification of what are actually benign growths. In fact about 95 per cent of skin cancers are basal or squamous cell epitheliomas, which do not spread from the skin and kill. Medicine has become more cautious due to the fear of litigation. It's safer to be class all growths as potentially suspicious, rather than run the risk of being sued for negligence. Epidemiologists have also calculated that there is a far greater death toll from vitamin D deficiency than from deaths conclusively attributable to exposure to sunshine.

The point is, it’s just so one sided. When I published a piece on the history of the sun tan in a national newspaper they provided a sidebar called sunbathing by numbers, which provided some figures such as '1,800 people die from melanoma disease each year'. What, globally? More people die of trouser-related mishaps. '10-15 minutes in the sun provide the vitamin D your body needs daily'. When? Where? In winter in the northern hemisphere it jolly well doesn't. There is, in fact, no agreed optimum intake for Vitamin D, and there is no toxicity from sunlight synthesised vitamin D, which cannot be said for food supplements.

But not just in the national media, the so called expert research journals also show their true colours when reporting this issue (the skin care and pharmaceutical companies do spend an awful lot of money in advertising in these journals, o, and funding research). I discovered this little gem in a reputable dermatological journal. The paper’s title declared its hypothesis: that ‘UV Light tanning [is] a type of substance-related disorder’. A psychological illness in other words. To prove this the researchers modified questionnaires used for alcoholics and drug-users to apply to tanning. They substituted drink or fix for ‘tan’ – eg. “when you wake up in the morning do you want to sun tan?”; or “do you try other non-sun-related activities, but find you really still like spending time in the sun?” – and descended on sunbathers minding their own business on Galveston Island Beach, Texas.

Now, I’m no scientist, but even I can see this is totally spurious from a methodological point of view. Not only were the results underwhelming, there was no control. I might easily have taken the same questionnaire and descended on a troupe of church goers in bible belt America and asked them the very same questions, substituting tan or sunbathing for 'prayer' or 'church-attendance', and got probably more conclusive results. Does that make churchgoing a substance related disorder (especially high church where they swing that holy smoke about). What’s evident and quite staggering is the need to defame this practice, and that a scientific journal is prepared to publish such unscientific piffle. Why? Because there are vested interests in scaring us out of the sun.

If this appears paranoid and conspiratorial check this out: "The Sun Safety Alliance, Inc. (SSA) is a communication and educationally focused not-for-profit organization with the mission to reduce the incidence of skin cancer. SSA is dedicated to creating national awareness of skin cancer as an important health issue. SSA believes that a concerted focus on skin cancer prevention, education, and awareness is the only way to change generations of behavior." One of their main recommendations is this: "Use of sunscreen with SPF 15 (for children under six, SPF 30 is recommended) or higher during the first 18 years of life can reduce some types of skin cancer by nearly 78%." Most of their advice involves slapping the stuff on, all year round. Their board members and business partners? You've guessed it, commercial organisations such as the National Association of Chain Drug Stores Foundation, and the manufacturers of healthcare products. Fear sells, but the sun is free. Enjoy.

*These views were particularly galling, given the presenter was interviewing me from the Costa del Sol (where the radio station was based), and I was in rainy London. Like the corpulent, sated poor house governors in Oliver Twist, he could not imagine how we poor orphans might be asking for a little more.

I haven't the foggiest
I'm frankly amazed at how much credibility folk give me when it comes to matters meteorological. They assume because I wrote a book about sunshine, I know a lot about the weather, and, here's the funny bit, might be able to predict what kind of summer we're going to have.

I'd better put the record straight. First of all, I have no interest in the weather in itself. I have a more than unhealthy interest in what the weather will do in the immediate future, and how this will affect my well-being / sanity; but I have no love of weather itself (it's the stuff that gets in the way of sunshine). I have no interest in or knowledge of meteorology. That is a science - the science of meteors, ie. stuff that falls from the skies, and I'd really rather it didn't. My relationship with the skies is profoundly superstitious, untouched by the supposed scientific breakthroughs that have 'revolutionised' forecasting since the middle of the last century. Supercomputers have replaced seaweed, in other words, which is a good deal cheaper and about as accurate.

What I do know of the weather which might form the basis of a prognosis for the summer is based on my acute memory of summers past. The data stored in my head and in my heart allows me to pronounce on the likely outcome for the summer, which can be summed up neatly as: 'buggered if I know'. The one sure thing I know about the British weather is that it is unknowable. And, therefore, a typical exchange in response to my stoical scepticism might go as follows:

Naive communicant: 'But we're having a lovely spring'
Sage who knows his onions (me): 'Groan. That's what worries me. We had a corker of a spring in 2007, followed by the worst summer in living memory. And last year? More sunshine in February than August'.
Slightly abashed naive communicant: 'So a good spring means a shoddy summer?'
Slightly smug sage: 'On recent performance. And vice versa. The spring of 2006 was pants. The wettest March since George IV, and dreary up to June; then 2 months of unbroken sunshine'.
Crestfallen communicant: 'So we're in for another stinker then?'
Starting to annoy sage: 'Not necessarily. You recall the summer of 03?
Weary communicant: 'What when all those people died from the heatwave?'
Wistful sage: 'That's the one. Glorious. Started in May, pretty much kept going without relent through to September. Records broken in August. It was ace.'
Brightening communicant: 'Ah, but we've had a really cold winter. It follows cold winter, scorching summer. So they say'.
Triumphantly smug sage: 'They say a lot of tosh. Winter of 62-3. Return of the ice age for 3 months. Followed by about average summer. And we all know what 'about average' UK summer is. Shite'.

I might hen bore them stupid with my roll call of good and bad summers, until they share my conviction that there's just no telling one way or the other, and hold a cast-iron conviction never to even mention the weather to me again.

Forecasting about

One of the curses of extreme helioholism is extreme scepticism when it comes to what 'they' say about the kind of summer we are likely to have. This is aggravated by a long memory and a festering grievance at the number of times 'they' have let us down in the past. 'They' being both the weather forecasters and the heavens themselves. 'They', as far as I'm concerned, are in it together, to set up false hope, frustrate desire and have fun at my expense.

I'm truly amazed at how short most peoples memories are. And simply staggered by how much faith they are prepared to put in these shabby shamen with supercomputers the weather men. How many times have I heard it asserted with straight-faced sincerity over the last week that 'it's going to be a good one this year'? And how many ejaculations of derision have I issued in response? Wearily I shake my head at their innocence, and point out they say something of the like every bleeding year, including ... and I always pause here for optimum effect, raising a horny finger heavenwards to silence their prattling platitudes with my sageous sermonising ... including that annus horribilis the so-called 'summer ' of 2007. Then, they - and I've worked myself up into just short of a frenzy by now, verily spitting the word out - they blithely predicted there was a good chance that that summer might be much like the one before. A scorcher, whose kind I fear we've seen the last of, going on recent performance. And we all know what happened then. I haven't forgotten, and I certainly haven't forgiven. Like some old fool who refuses to buy a 'Jap' car, because of what they did in the war, I refuse to buy their prognoses, and hold a burning dagger in my heart for their long-range mendacity.

They are up to their tricks again. Barbecue summer? My arse. Is this what's got everyone excited? Mealy mouthed half-promises to placate an easily duped nation. It'll take more than that to fool me. And don't say I didn't warn you if those barbecue coals bought in anticipation in May are still unused come September.