Rose Jones, on how to avoid drying out in the heat
Yes, you wait through the winter looking forward to the intensely deep blue skies, heat that roasts the day and embraces the night, and wall-to-whitewashed-wall sunshine. And then? You complain about it.
I don’t: I love sunshine. I can cope with cold, but I hate dark and gloomy skies. Sunlight, like Guinness (remember the advert?) is good for you. Canadian psychologists put sunlight-mimicking lights into some schools a few years ago and found that the children there learnt better, were healthier and were better adjusted than those without: even their dental health improved! Medics in Scandinavia treat depressives with ‘sunshine’ lights, in case they are suffering from SAD. No, that’s not a comment on their fashion sense, it’s Seasonally Affected Disorder. What it means is that long, dark, miserable winters, not very surprisingly, make people miserable. We respond to gloom with gloom and to sunshine with glee!
The Spanish have a rather different take on sunshine though. By and large, they avoid it. Coffee, a game of cards, or a restaurant lunch will all take place inside. Taking the air in the square means finding a bench in the shade. In the houses windows are both shuttered and curtained, to make sure not a peep of light squeaks through.
Sunlight lightens. It’s an extraordinarily efficient bleach, given enough time: look at the washed-out posters on walls. I dry clothing inside out so that the colour doesn’t fade to a washed out had-it-for-years look after just a couple of weeks. It’s the opposite with human skin, as we know well, but parking yourself in it while you turn from faun to blush to pink to tomato colour will make you old and wrinkly before your time. That’s not just old-looking, it’s genuinely old: direct sunshine will actually age the skin so that it becomes permanently less elastic. You sit back in the glare of it, your sunglasses sliding down the sweat on your nose, sip your wine and feel wonderful. But when you come in you feel shattered, drained of energy and you’ve got a headache coming on, you’re crabby, you can’t think clearly. The weather is making you sick again: but this time it’s dehydration and heat exhaustion.
Sunstroke and heat-stroke can be very nasty, but most of us live with mild dehydration throughout the summer. Most of us slap on a bit of sun-cream and drink the odd bottle of water, but we hugely underestimate how much were making up for. We don’t just sunbath, we combine sunbathing and alcohol and, if we can, with spells in the swimming pool, all of which such the water out of our bodies.
You’ve probably heard that we should all drink more water. Sometimes the media says we should drink 7 glasses a day, sometimes a litre, and sometimes 3 pints. Then an ‘expert’ says it needn’t be water, and soft-drink sales rocket until someone else points out that the fizzy drinks (cokes, fantas etc) are over-sweetened gassy diuretics. Then there is a craze for mineral waters until we find some big company has been putting anti-freeze in theirs. It’s a bit confusing. All I know is, if I don’t drink enough water I get a terrible headache.
I like tap water. It’s not don’t like bottled, it’s just that I resent paying about €1.20 for 50ml when I can get the same thing (or near as damn it) for about €0.00000001 per litre. But I like my water cold, and many people are horrified by the very idea of tap water, so I keep a bottle in the fridge (and fill it from the tap). No-one has ever noticed, to date.
I like the shade, but not quite as much as the locals, not yet. I can’t bring myself to abandon our roof terrace, or sit in the smoky cramped interior of a bar next to the domino-players when there are sunny tables and a pleasant breeze outside.
I don’t do hats. A cap, maybe, but they don’t always go. As for hat’s, they make me feel like I’m trying out for a costume drama: “Good morning Mistress Burlington-Brown, what a charming bonnet you have on”. Not really me. I prefer to stick (and stick is the word) to sun creams.
I’m a big fan of sun blocks and sun creams, in spite of expense. The problems are remembering to put it on, getting out of the bathroom with slippery hands when you do remember (embarrassing) and remembering to re-apply. I spent a morning at a beach once having put my last splash of sun cream on. The look of pain on other people’s faces, when they saw my back was shocking, but not quite as much as the bubble-wrap texture of the skin I couldn’t see. I’m not convinced about after-sun lotions: they are just cheap moisturizing lotion, and I’d rather go the whole hog and get a proper one or not bother.
Using a moisturising soap is probably more effective than using After-Sun. Good soap replenishes the skin as well as cleaning it. Although fat-based soaps clean and protect the skin, they don’t let it breathe; for that you need an oil-based soap. Apparently, it also provides vitamin E, which the body can absorb through the skin. Luckily, you can easily get locally made oil-based soaps. Here on Europe’s sun bed, nature provides tonnes of stuff for us to get busy moisturizing ourselves with! There are almond and sunflower oils as well as the fabulously versatile olive, too. There are herb oils, too: you can get soaps with all kinds of herbs in, which make them both beneficial and sweet-smelling. The countryside here is thick with herbs: on local walks I’ve seen wild rosemary, thyme, mint, sage, and more. Then there’re avocados: not only nutritious but moisturizing too. I suppose it is not that surprising, that Mediterranean plants are full of juices that prevent dehydration, but it’s very handy for us.
So having got up for the day and showered with my nice moisturizing soaps, topped of with a little extra rich moisturizer for my face, picked up my bottle of water (extra large), sprayed on my factor 20 and picked up my cap, I’m ready to drink Tinto Verano in the sun on the pool-side all day! (I should be so lucky…)
