This may not seem very seasonal, but I’m
almost due for what is fast becoming my
traditional mid-December spray tan. I had
one this time last year and I’m about to have
another. I say it’s unseasonal, but then again
I bet, even as I speak, loads of young women,
not just in Essex, are having spray tans in
preparation for the festive party season.
Mine is because I’m having my picture taken
soon and a tan makes me look slimmer
and younger.
Mind you, after my spray tan this time
last year, I’m lucky to be here at all. One
absurd suggestion I made back then, from
the temporary three-sided tanning booth
that had been rigged up in our main room,
could easily have seen me humiliated,
pilloried, cancelled. I blush with shame to
recall the moment.
A young woman had come around to
administer the all-over gunk. Except it wasn’t
quite all over. Of course it wasn’t; I was
wearing a pair of Speedos. The two of us made
small talk. I don’t know what possessed me,
but I asked the spray-tan woman if I should
remove my Speedos.
“No,” she replied, not recoiling in horror,
but evidently discomfited by the suggestion,
as well she might be, alone in a strange house
with a strange man.
I’m normally so careful, so nuanced, about
these matters. Or I like to think so, anyway.
That idea that when a man finds himself
walking behind a lone woman on an empty
street late at night, he should cross over to the
other pavement to allay any fear she is feeling?
I totally do that! I was doing it, instinctively,
years ago, before it even became a thing.
I don’t much like the sound of echoing
footsteps behind me on an empty street, so
why, I reasoned, should I subject someone
else to the same fear?
Also, if I’m on the bus or the Tube at night,
I always get up and stand by the door long
before my stop so as to reassure any woman
also alighting that I’m not following her. I want
to avoid her getting up to leave and me then
doing so afterwards, because that might
worry her.
So, on the 388 bus home, I always ring
the bell the moment we pull away from the
previous stop outside Sainsbury’s Local on
Mare Street, before any other passenger has
a chance to ring it themselves, let alone
make a move to get up prior to exit at the
stop for King Edward’s Road.You know how it’s said that it takes years
to build a reputation and only seconds to
destroy one? Well, I was a whisker away from
that being true, of all my good work over
the years being set at nought, thanks to one
idiotic indiscretion.
Proposing to strip naked in front of a young
woman who’d met me for the first time ten
minutes before? Behind closed doors? What
on earth was I thinking?
I was thinking about tan lines and how
I don’t like them. I was thinking about getting
smudges and smears on my Speedos. I was
thinking about how in France the previous
summer (and every summer), I’d spent a
great deal of time sunbathing naked to
achieve an even tan. I was thinking maybe
I was being a bit prudish in wearing
anything on this occasion too, forgetting
the all-important business of context and
familiarity. I was thinking I’d never had
a spray tan before and maybe total nudity is
the norm. I was thinking, in other words
(insofar as I was thinking at all), purely
narcissistically, ignorantly, narrowly, selfishly.
I was emphatically not making a pervy
proposal.
When my words came out as they did,
and she reacted as she did, I was mortified.
I still am.
If that woman went back to her office that
afternoon, or out with her friends that night,
and told the story of the middle-aged
journalist who’d breezily asked her if it was
OK to expose himself, she’d have been justified
in trashing my good name.
It doesn’t make me Harvey Weinstein.
But it does demonstrate that, while decent
men know there is a line you should not cross,
that line moves, due to time and place and
circumstance, and when it does move, even
those of us who like to think we are cautious,
courteous men sometimes bungle our way
right over it.
When I told the story to four female
colleagues, they all laughed uproariously at my
incompetence and misfortune. But they all
know me well. They know that while I may be
a klutz, I am not a creep. That young spray-tan
woman didn’t know me at all though.
A lot of men around my age who moan
about wokery sigh, “You’ve got to be so careful
these days, haven’t you?” To which I say, yes
mate. You have. And so you should be. n[email protected]‘My naked spray
tan blunder?
I’m still getting
over the shame’
Beta male
Robert Crampton
© Times Newspapers Ltd, 2021. Published and licensed by Times Newspapers Ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF (020 7782 5000). Printed by Prinovis UK Ltd, Liverpool. Not to be sold separately.TOM JACKSON
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