WITH the holiday season going into overdrive, every magazine is packed with advice on how to get a lovely sun tan that will leave you glowing with health. Coupled with this is very sensible advice on how not to get a sunburn which will leave you glowing, but not with health. This has, up to a point, always been the case but now everyone has to be made aware of the dangers of skin cancer and given information how to protect themselves. I can't help thinking back to the time when no-one knew about the dangers of sunburn nor had any idea that exposure to the sun could cause cancer. It's a bit like smoking really. There was a time when it was not only encouraged but practically obligatory and people who didn't smoke were looked on as wimps and even used to apologise. 'Sorry, I don't smoke, I never really took to it,' they would say in a humble voice as everyone around them lit up their Park Drives. It was the same with getting 'tanned'. Come summer, which, of course, was always longer and hotter than it is now, the aim of most people was to lie in the full midday sun somewhere and come home with burning shoulders. You saw them on every beach. Whole families of pure white people, whose skin had never been exposed to so much as a ray for the rest of the year, removing as many clothes as was then deemed polite and proceeding to sit there slowly turning into tomatoes. It was part of the bucket and spade holiday scene, along with deck chairs, knitted bathing suits, flasks of tea, which always smelled funny no matter how often you washed the flask, hard-boiled egg sandwiches and sand in everything. People took great pride in just how much of their bodies they managed to singe, exposing roasted thighs and burning bellies to anyone who would look, and lots who didn't want to. It was a kind of a badge of honour that you came home from a day on the beach or a week at the seaside an entirely different colour, hopefully aching all over and certainly shedding great quantities of skin like autumn leaves. Peeling was part of the final goal of getting a sun tan like Brigitte Bardot. Come the advent of package holidays and the problem got even worse. People went to countries where the sun shone with greater intensity than they had been used to and consequently there were those who spent the first day basking like whales on golden sands and the next four days lying groaning face-down on their hotel room beds. Dads and uncles quite often sat under a Mediterranean sky in string vests, refusing for the sake of modesty to remove them, and ended up with an interesting net pattern all over their chests and backs. There were sun tan products, but most were aimed at getting brown and not preventing sun burn. People oiled themselves with goodness knows what – including olive oil – in the hope that their glistening flesh would go browner quicker. And you could always tell the ones who used lard, they were the ones with the cloud of flies round them! I was lucky in a way because my grandmother, having lived in a country where there were very hot summers, used to tell tales of doom about sunstroke, of little children who one minute were happily basking in the noonday sun and the next minute foaming at the mouth with their blood boiling. Or was that the cautionary tale warning me not to touch stray dogs lest I get rabies? It didn't matter, she had a cautionary tale for most things, usually beginning 'I used to know someone', and usually involving small children who didn't listen to their elders and betters. I particularly remember the not going out in a thunderstorm one, which included graphic details of a tiny child who did and was struck by lightning and all they found was her tiny patent leather shoes still smoking. There was a slight variation of this tale when it came to touching electrical items with wet hands. It might not be politically correct now to terrify small children into not doing things, but it worked. So I tended to remain pale and not particularly interesting, which was why I was delighted when the very first 'self tan' products arrived on the market, which offered a chance for a golden tan without leaving the bedroom. The very first self tan was a clear liquid and very expensive, or expensive when you are a junior reporter. One of my colleagues, a young man who was fairly vain and also wanted a golden tan, said he would go halves with me so we bought a bottle. It was, sadly, not so much a golden hue that we both turned, more gingery orange, and because neither of us had read the instructions properly we both had bright orange hands which seemed to last three times longer than the rest of the tan. For several weeks we both had to wear long sleeves to hide the less than attractive streaks up and down our arms and he blamed me because his girlfriend refused to go to the beach with him. Things have moved on now, with good products offering non-ginger self tans, salons offering sprayed on tans, sun beds and a huge range of high factor skin protection products. Sadly, people – and I'm sorry to say especially men – still go out into the sun without any protection at all and still appear home from holidays in the sun as red as beetroots in various stages of skin loss.

When I mentioned that people sometimes used olive oil as a tanning medium I, of course, meant the only sort of olive oil which was generally available, the tasteless sort sold in chemist shops. How things have moved on since then, with olive oil from all corners of the globe now available and the advent of the olive oil bore. Olive oil bores can bore to Olympic standard on the merits of olive oils. From a nation who until only a few decades ago only used olive oil to rub into our shoulders we are now experts. We can talk about Tuscany and Provence, about the merits of one particular Greek island over another, about virgin first cold pressed one variety left side of the little hill overlooking the Med oil, sold by a family who have been growing olives since Roman times. I fear I'm in the running to become an olive oil bore. I usually have at least four different oils. One for cooking, a light version (preferably Italian), one for making dressings which don't need to be too overpowered by a first cold pressed etc. One for making mayonnaise and dressings for less delicate vegetables and for various sauces. And one really good one for dribbling over things, dipping bread etc. I've not quite gone so far as to go to tastings or being able to tell the difference between a hill in Italy or a plain in Spain but it may come. My excuse is that olive oil is very good for you, is low in unsaturated fat, or is that saturated in low fat, I never can remember? I also have a huge variety of other oils – grapeseed, sesame, hazelnut, walnut and pumpkinseed oil, plus the only oil I will use for frying when I'm not using olive oil, which is groundnut, made from peanuts. We oil snobs wouldn't, incidentally, be caught dead with anything marked 'vegetable oil' in our cupboards. The next step from being an olive oil bore is being a vinegar bore. Once, when you went into a shop you had few choices. Usually it was brown, with a pungent scent and called Sarsons. It was cheap, used to douse raw vegetables in (notably red cabbage, which is now almost on the gourmet list but at one time only came floating in Sarsons in large jars and tasted of nothing apart from vinegar). Sarsons was cheap and cheerful, although some fish and chip shops used to dilute it with water to get the most out of a bottle. Today, you can pay a large sum of money for bottles of vintage Balsamic vinegar which will never see sight of a red cabbage. People actually go to tastings of Balsamic vinegar, going on about it in language akin to wine tasting – fruity, woody, ashy, musty etc. Apart from Balsamic there is wine vinegar (red and white), cider vinegar, sherry vinegar, rice vinegar, vinegar with bits of lemon, orange, herb etc floating in it. Alright, I confess, I've got them all, including Sarsons because you can't possibly pickle an egg or an onion in anything else.

PS By the way Mr Chirac, you may think that we British can't cook and you French can cook anything (although I've had some horrible food in France as well as some wonderful food), but we can organise an Olympic bid now, can't we?