Freckly dervish

I have beautiful skin. Sure, it's taken a while to get over adolescent breakouts and such, but yes: I have the kind of skin people have written about. Pale, sometimes English Rose-y, translucent skin. Which works well if you're the very lovely Kate Winslet, or if Shakespeare is writing a sonnet about a girl but is not only dangerously impractical in such a sunny place as South Africa but is also something of a rarity even among Pomeranian boy imports such as myself. I suppose if I wore shorts and a 'muscle tee' and forgoed- forwent- for- stopped using sunblock, I too would be more tanned.

But, see, the use of sunblock is twofold. It is:
1. To prevent sun-induced ageing. Goddess, but I'm ageing fast enough as it is. And, mostly,
2. To prevent sun-induced freckling.

Yes people, put me in the sun and I freckle. Or I did. Years of careful choice of SPF moisturiser and general covering up while outside mean that I no longer have the band of freckles across my nose and under my eyes that I sported as a child, and I am much relieved. I never found it cute, and I always coveted my friends' even, olive skin that would soak up all manner of solar rays and do nothing more than look even healthier afterwards. Not me. Freckle City.

However, one teensy-tiny recent lapse of judgment, and the freckles are back in force. Not on my face, thankfully - I could never be so rash as to spend even an hour without quality moisturiser on - but on my arm. Yes, just the one that happened to be sticking out of the shade of a tree at a picnic. Wasn't a hot day*, you see, so I didn't think about sunblock. You can see where my T-shirt began and ended not by the sunburn - which has since faded - but by the freckling. Never mind being an irritation when you've spent years applying sunblock to attain even skin in this brilliantly sunny yet ozone-deficient land; is this even normal, I ask you?

Oh, and as for the dervish reference, I am reading the wonderful The Time Traveler's Wife and came across a reference to the members of a jazz trio who were playing with such abandon that they were described as 'sonic dervishes'. Wouldn't that be the most fantastic name for a band? I want to be a Sonic Dervish. You'd buy our album, I bet you would. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the Sonic Dervishes! [insert sounds of screaming fans]


*I shamefully admit to having been a science major at university, and I do, deep down, understand that it is infra-red rays wot make you feel hot. You can't sense ultra-violet at all until you're burnt and it's too late. But you think, 'Oh, I'll just for once enjoy the feeling of being outside and having warm sunshine on my skin, and it won't be for very long anyway, it's sooooo nice!' Humph.