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.