A redhead’s tales of summer and bathing in sunscreen

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Astronauts get a free pass to skip the hot planets, but I have to walk to the post office to collect my package before it closes at 5pm … on a 35-degree day?

We all have a preferred route to the local shops. It might be the quickest, or along the most picturesque streets, or through the bush with the fewest – or most – discarded bongs. But for the melanin-deficient, our paths in summer must be chosen based on the sheer amount of shade.

I walk down the busiest and most hideous stretch of road in my suburb, sucking in petrol fumes, simply because it has awnings. When the awnings end, I dart between the shade of trees, sweating more profusely than Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in a BBC interview.

In such brutal conditions, I can go for coffee only before 9am, embryonically slick with two types of sunblock, and dressed like the invisible man – hats, sunglasses, anything to block the sun.

My mysteriously olive-skinned mother brags that I was never sunburnt while under her care because she would spray me with sunblock every single day before school. My sister, with her jet-black hair, doesn’t tan under fluoro lights like me.

I’m a day walker, meaning I’m not as ginger as some. My hair was extremely red as a kid, but in a dark room, I could pass for brown hair. Out in the sun, however, the body keeps the score.

Gingers inevitably learn the hard way that other countries don’t really have sunblock as we do in Australia. I still have tan lines from foolishly trusting bootleg Banana Boat in Bali more than a year ago.

In much of Europe, they don’t even sell sunblock. In Rome, I was offered tanning oil – either a sick joke or an actual murder attempt by the pharmacist.

I could strap tiny bottles of Australian-grade sunblock to my person and smuggle it onto the plane, but I don’t imagine Border Force would be happy to see me through the x-ray machine.

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Australians with British ancestry often joke that the best thing their ancestors did was steal a loaf so they could be banished to paradise. One of my ancestors, James Duffin, has hung around in St Stephen’s Cemetery in Sydney’s Camperdown since 1878. His certificate of freedom notes “blue eyes” and “ruddy complexion”. Telltale signs of the recessive genetics I inherited.

I visited him recently (don’t worry, it was in winter) and had just one thought: “At least they have got him in the shade.”

The cemetery is also conveniently located next to some of the country’s most gentrified bakeries. Maybe, come March, I’ll visit James and pinch a $14 loaf of fenugreek-sesame sourdough – in the hope I can get a free ticket to a cooler climate.