cheeks.
When I was sixteen, I was so badly sunburned I had to spend two days in bed. My mother said, casually, “Well, I
did
warn you.”
I read an article in a magazine. And I learned: people with freckles don’t tan properly. So that was why. The freckles were
to blame.
It’s not as if I was careless or stupid in my dealings with the sun. I didn’t
seek out
blazing sunshine with all its ensuing pain. I just found it hard to always wear a hat, sit in the shade, avoid hot days,
never wear skirts in summer. I longed to be a vampire, because at least then my sun affliction would be a symptom of my dangerous
and evil nature. Instead, I was merely pale. And, did I mention this?
Freckled
. Who ever heard of a vampire with freckles?
A fact: a freckled person can never, ever, be cool.
What’s worse, the freckles grew and multiplied in sunlight. Some summers, I was covered in blotches, like some alien in a
Star Trek
episode. And so as I hit twenty, the pale spectacled mutant-freckle look was becoming the bane of my life. It defined me,
it limited me. And it controlled how others perceived me: I was never smart, tough-cookie, wisecracking brain-like-a-razorblade
Lena. I was just poor old
freckly
Lena.
I came to hate suntans. I hated the vulgar display of long-legged beauties with their bronzed skins, and men with six-pack
torsos who wear no T-shirts in the blazing sun.
Florence was my favourite city, I used to go there every year when I was in my twenties. But it was spoiled for me by all
the bare skin on shameless display. The city was swarming with gorgeous, smiling, happy, slim, sexy, tanned young people,
in their revealing shorts and skimpy T-shirts. They were everywhere, and I loathed them.
The purest joy I knew was when I went to see the Donatellos and the Giambolognas in the Bargello and Michelangelo’s
David
in the Accademia. I adored the look and texture and sensual joy of those naked muscular bodies which were, arguably through
historical accident, but that’s not an argument which concerns me here, entirely
untanned
.
And even now, many years later, I am offended at the basic unfairness of this whole skin thing. It affronts me that some people
can absorb sun like oxygen. They never sear or scald, they are at ease with their own bodies. Whereas I… I… I .
. .
Move on, Lena.
And yet, I’ve always been fit. Wiry, lean –
fit
. At university I was a famously keen runner. During my twenties I would run ten or twenty miles a week. But for reasons I
can never comprehend, I never managed to be happy in the body I wore. The moment I entered a room, my posture and poise projected
the unmistakable message: It’s Only Me.
And, most monstrous of all, added to the unfairness of having freckles and pale skin in an Ambre Solaire-worshipping culture,
it was also unjust that after years of keeping fit and watching my diet, of not gorging on rich foods, not drinking rich red
wines, not splurging on melty fat-rich suppurating cheeses, and not oozing cream éclairs down my delirious throat, and not
having pig-out midnight feasts of icecream from the carton, of shunning cooked breakfasts with greasy sausages and crispy
fried bread and never eating rich meat sauces with wine or madeira or port or brandy, after all those many years of moderation
and restraint and holding back, it was simply not fucking fair that at the age of forty-four I should suffer a massive and
fatal heart attack.
That, and freckles. Those are the two things about my life that I most resent.
I am God.
And so are You.
After my first degree at Edinburgh, I chose to move to Oxford to pursue my DPhil. My subject was the history of science, focusing
on the remarkable rivalry between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The work I did in those years proved to be the foundation of my future work on systems and psychology. I found it absorbing
and
When I was sixteen, I was so badly sunburned I had to spend two days in bed. My mother said, casually, “Well, I
did
warn you.”
I read an article in a magazine. And I learned: people with freckles don’t tan properly. So that was why. The freckles were
to blame.
It’s not as if I was careless or stupid in my dealings with the sun. I didn’t
seek out
blazing sunshine with all its ensuing pain. I just found it hard to always wear a hat, sit in the shade, avoid hot days,
never wear skirts in summer. I longed to be a vampire, because at least then my sun affliction would be a symptom of my dangerous
and evil nature. Instead, I was merely pale. And, did I mention this?
Freckled
. Who ever heard of a vampire with freckles?
A fact: a freckled person can never, ever, be cool.
What’s worse, the freckles grew and multiplied in sunlight. Some summers, I was covered in blotches, like some alien in a
Star Trek
episode. And so as I hit twenty, the pale spectacled mutant-freckle look was becoming the bane of my life. It defined me,
it limited me. And it controlled how others perceived me: I was never smart, tough-cookie, wisecracking brain-like-a-razorblade
Lena. I was just poor old
freckly
Lena.
I came to hate suntans. I hated the vulgar display of long-legged beauties with their bronzed skins, and men with six-pack
torsos who wear no T-shirts in the blazing sun.
Florence was my favourite city, I used to go there every year when I was in my twenties. But it was spoiled for me by all
the bare skin on shameless display. The city was swarming with gorgeous, smiling, happy, slim, sexy, tanned young people,
in their revealing shorts and skimpy T-shirts. They were everywhere, and I loathed them.
The purest joy I knew was when I went to see the Donatellos and the Giambolognas in the Bargello and Michelangelo’s
David
in the Accademia. I adored the look and texture and sensual joy of those naked muscular bodies which were, arguably through
historical accident, but that’s not an argument which concerns me here, entirely
untanned
.
And even now, many years later, I am offended at the basic unfairness of this whole skin thing. It affronts me that some people
can absorb sun like oxygen. They never sear or scald, they are at ease with their own bodies. Whereas I… I… I .
. .
Move on, Lena.
And yet, I’ve always been fit. Wiry, lean –
fit
. At university I was a famously keen runner. During my twenties I would run ten or twenty miles a week. But for reasons I
can never comprehend, I never managed to be happy in the body I wore. The moment I entered a room, my posture and poise projected
the unmistakable message: It’s Only Me.
And, most monstrous of all, added to the unfairness of having freckles and pale skin in an Ambre Solaire-worshipping culture,
it was also unjust that after years of keeping fit and watching my diet, of not gorging on rich foods, not drinking rich red
wines, not splurging on melty fat-rich suppurating cheeses, and not oozing cream éclairs down my delirious throat, and not
having pig-out midnight feasts of icecream from the carton, of shunning cooked breakfasts with greasy sausages and crispy
fried bread and never eating rich meat sauces with wine or madeira or port or brandy, after all those many years of moderation
and restraint and holding back, it was simply not fucking fair that at the age of forty-four I should suffer a massive and
fatal heart attack.
That, and freckles. Those are the two things about my life that I most resent.
I am God.
And so are You.
After my first degree at Edinburgh, I chose to move to Oxford to pursue my DPhil. My subject was the history of science, focusing
on the remarkable rivalry between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The work I did in those years proved to be the foundation of my future work on systems and psychology. I found it absorbing
and