Synopsis
Apropos very little, here’s a useless piece of information with which to baffle your friends, colleagues and family members.You’ve possibly heard of people being described of as ‘posh’, meaning that they were somewhat upper-class or in many situations, that for some unfathomable reason, they think they are. Did you ever wonder where the word comes from?Well, the answer is, it’s an acronym for ‘port out, starboard home’, which is a reference to the days of the British empire when the ladies – the real ladies – who were sailing out to India would stay on the port side of the ship whilst they would stick to starboard on the way back.Why? Because they didn’t want their perfect milk white skin tainted by any hint of having been in the sun! Imagine that, going to all that effort to avoid even the merest tinge of facial redness because it was considered low-class, something that only the common hoi-poloi would ever be subjected to or even contemplate!How times change.From the mid-1990’s onwards, most people couldn’t wait to get away from it all so they could disrobe on the beach before subjecting their body to the seemingly warming, calming ministrations of a blazing sun in a clear blue sky.The cost of air travel fell so that overseas vacations became a genuine possibility for millions of people for the very first time and, boy, did they take advantage of that fact. People who had never before travelled much further than the family car would take them were now able to fly thousands of miles to chase the sun. Thus, they were able to expose themselves to the warmth of the sun for the very first time, and they could not believe their luck.Of course, because of their inexperience, most of these people suffered sunburn to a greater or lesser degree at some point, and equally obviously, most of them had very little idea about what to do when they did so.In this guide, I am therefore going to look at three things.Firstly, I am going to expand upon exactly why the ‘posh’ ladies got it right whereas for most of the second half of the 20th century, we were all getting it very wrong as far as the sun and its potential ‘benefits’ were concerned.Secondly, I want to bring the whole thing bang up-to-date by looking at what you can do to minimize the dangers represented by the sun when you go on holiday, because there is no doubt that playing on the beach in the sunshine is an essential part of the family holiday for many millions of people all over the world. And of course, the main objective is to focus on natural ways of minimizing the dangers posed by being out in the sun for a lengthy period of time.Thirdly, I am going to highlight natural ways of dealing with the adverse effects of too much exposure to the sun.Although it should be possible with sensible precautions to limit the chances of sunburn happening to you or family members, it is unfortunately a fact that balancing enough sunshine against too much is not always a particularly easy task. This is especially true if you are someone to whom regular exposure to the sun is unusual because you have far less natural ability to withstand the effects of sunshine.
