Is this karma at work?

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Should be!

I saw that piece. Well done the beak.

Can never apply to me. I gave up sunbathing on arrival in Crete in +/- 1980. I sat under the awning of a taverna watching the women fry themselves -all topless, rows of ‘fried eggs’.

But sun damage lingers on. I had a carcinoma dug out Oct '23.

Yes it does - I saw many Caucasian folks in Turks & Caicos with skin like leather.

I used sunblock and often wore a hat. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

When visiting the UK, and getting a connecting flight to Joburg; I used to leave my car at friends at what is still generally known as PE (Port Elizabeth) though now renamed ‘Gqeberha’ (the q is a click sound that defeats many locals).

My friends were of British descent, he was ginger haired and had terminal skin cancer, while his wife who’d obviously once been a very beautiful woman with a fine bone structure and green eyes, now looked about thirty years older than she actually was, with arms shrivelled like strips of biltong.

Nevertheless they were still sunbathing by their pool…

Sun on your skin = skin damage.

Not enough sun = vitamin D deficiency.

It’s not easy being Scottish.

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Surprisingly, it’s the Dutch and Danes, not the Scots and Irish, who have the highest European incidence of skin cancer. From that one might deduce that as long as the latter stay at home under their clouds, they should be OK.

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Surprisingly? We couldn’t get it on prescription.

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Thing is, the damage can go back decades. My mother was a nurse in the [originally] Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service until they got rid of the ‘Imperial’

All her war service was in “It ain’t 'alf 'ot, Mum!” places - India, Sumatra, Ceylon, Singapore and again in Singapore, where I was 4-7 y.o.

I don’t know for sure but I can imagine a c/o asking

“Sister. Is this man reporting hor de combat on account of sunburn!?”

“Yes, major”.

“Has he had the standing order about covering up and so forth!?”

“Yes, Major”

“Right! Self inflicted wound! Sgt! This man to jankers! 30 days! Next..!”

On a P & O brochure shoot to the Caribbean I put on my expenses a bottle of sun screen. We spent hours on the decks shooting the stuff you see on the ads and brochures.

Being +/- 45 years ago this was not just refused but laughed off. 45 years later I had a carcinoma on my upper rt shoulder and a pre-cancerous actinic teratosis on my left temple

On the other hand, an American photographer I worked with had a job in Arctic Alaska. He and the art director put in for arctic jackets. Bean counters in the agency in NYC rejected these claims.

They re-submitted their expenses. In place of the arctic jackets they put “To rental of alligator”. The fact that an alligator did not feature in the subsequent ads was irrelevant. The set-ups simply didn’t work when they ‘included’ the alligator…

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