ENGLISH MUM: never knowingly undercatered

So it was sunny again yesterday.  Imagine: sunny!  In Cavan!  I sat outside and watched hoards of small boys kick a football about on the lawn while I read a magazine.  I love a magazine.  I’m quite picky, I don’t like all that crap about ‘what Posh thinks about David’s biceps’ but I can’t walk past the magazine section in Tesco without nabbing a Good Housekeeping (what?  It’s the recipes), a Red, or my all-time fave, Eve.  I’ve even started buying Irish ones, but there’s something in there I don’t get at all.  What’s with the huge section at the back where they put in a sort of social diary thing, with pictures of people grinning over glasses of champagne?  It’s like: ‘here’s Bertie Ahern hobnobbing with some orange woman at the opening of the first toilet stall on the left at some huge shopping centre’, then ‘oh, look, and here’s Rosanna Davidson (random orange ‘model’ and daughter of that bloke that did Lady in Red’), sharing a joke with…surprise!… an orange woman at a charidee event to feed poor orphaned ‘You’re a Star’ contestants at McDonalds’.  Now I know that it’s less relevant to me because I don’t recognise anybody, but I mean, where do all these orange women come from?  There must be a factory somewhere in South County Dublin churning out hundreds of identikit orange women with long blonde hair, perfect white teeth and cleavage, purely to frequent the back pages of Image Magazine or Irish Tatler.  Now you know me, I’m a great advocate of intervention for the sake of self esteem, whether it be from a few foils or even some cosmetic dentistry, but blimey, girls, step away from the Fake Bake already!

Anyway, my point in all this really wasn’t the orange women, it was the whole fake tan thing.  I noticed yesterday, during the aforementioned garden lolling, that I’m quite pasty at the moment, which is unusual for me.  I had to pop (I say ‘pop’ when I really mean ‘drive 40 minutes’) to the shops anyway to pick up some stuff for C next door (yes, she’s home from the hospital at last) and I loitered for a long while in the fake tan section, worrying about being taking the plunge and being Satsuma coloured.  Oh.  I forgot to say that boys, you can look away now as I’ve finished talking about leggy blonde models and there’s product-talk coming up.

So there on the shelf was something called St Tropez Everyday.  Reader, I was wary.  I had a friend back in the UK that got one of those St Tropez things and you can’t wash it off for something like 8 hours, so she had to come and get the kids from school looking like an Oompah Loompah.  Not a good look.  But this was just a body moisturiser with a little extra help.  So I took the plunge.  And do you know what?  It works!  Admittedly I didn’t put it on my face, but my knees aren’t streaky, my feet aren’t carroty and my legs are smooth and, dare I say it, lightly bronzed .

So there you have it.  Rush out and get yourself some St Tropez Everyday.  Ain’t no tangerines in this here town y’all.