I've never quite understood the appeal of the ubertan. I'm cursed with Irish skin, so I'd like to go brown, just a bit brown, just once, if only so that I could wear a short skirt without blinding small children and dogs. But spending the whole day oiled up and lying on bacofoil in the hope of one day looking like a leatherette armchair fails to attract.

A headteacher in Lancashire has had an awful lot of grief for asking parents not to allow their children to use fake tan. I have some sympathy for her. The thought of walking into a classroom expecting to see the brightly scrubbed faces of teenage girls who should be dodging the cosmetics companies while they still can, only to find 30 or more David Dickinsons and Dale Wintons staring back, makes me want to put on a muumuu and a balaclava immediately.

Ronaldo's at it too. Not that Ronaldo, and not that "it", at least not with "those". There I was thinking that during the football off season (which I believe now lasts just long enough for Gary Lineker to brush his teeth) Ronaldo would be washing his car, joining the National Trust, maybe catching up on The Wire (it is good though, isn't it? Isn't it good?). Confounding expectations, it turns out he just spends his spare time at Club Tropicana. Apparently the drinks are free.

The most worrying consequence of the continuing obsession with tanning is that it makes me feel sorry for Michael Jackson. He's been vilified for (among other things, let's be honest) turning himself white, at a time when making oneself artificially brown is seen as the height of sophistication.

This suntan lark's a modern affair. It was invented by Coco Chanel, like the little black dress and, after she married Mr The Clown, clowns. Presumably people got brown in the sun before Chanel, but it didn't look nearly as fashionable. Then it became all the rage. In the early 1960s my mother and her friends would sunbathe on the roof of the Westminster nurses' home on Vincent Square, not protected by suntan lotion, but essentially basted in it, accelerant that it was. But 'twas not ever thus. The Greeks and Romans got lead poisoning in the name of paler skin, and I'd have been something of a hottie in Elizabeth I's day. Which means, then, that no one in history has just let themselves look how they look. Apart from maybe Patti Smith, but she's always been way cooler than the rest of us. The gloop we're prepared to smear all over ourselves in the name of looking darker or lighter than we really do, having bigger eyes or fuller lips than we really do. Anything but look how nature or God or David Icke intended us to. What an awful shame.

So, I say to the girls at Baines school, and to you, because while I think I'm down with the kids I don't flatter myself that 14-year-olds read what I have to write, oh and to my mum, because I don't particularly flatter myself that anyone but her reads what I have to write: wash that muck off your face, you're bloody gorgeous.

Anyway, got to take the computer off my lap or my legs will go streaky.