I’m an SPF50+ redhead. Walk a mile in my shoes, but never in daylight

2 months ago 15

Opinion

December 30, 2025 — 3.00pm

Every November, the first warm wind of the year sweeps in from the desert, across the coast, and carries out to sea my hopes of going outside again until March.

For most people, the “Christmas Wind”, as I’ve always called it, feels optimistic after the cold of winter. It smells like sunny days, salty hair, cold schooners and cricket. But for me, and all my soldiers in the gingerverse, it smells like dread.

A very young Perry Duffin endured long, hot summers.

People of the SPF50+ persuasion truly, seriously struggle to operate when temperatures climb above the mid-20s.

While the rest of the world worries climate change will make Earth too hot to live on, rangas get a preview every year.

All through summer, the sun rushes to its zenith and hangs there, taunting me from an oppressively blue sky. Long into the evening. And just to rub salt into the sunburn, we change our clocks to extend my torture by an hour.

Summer can be dull when half the day is simply off-limits. Let’s sit in the beer garden, the group chat callously suggests. Let’s go to the beach, my girlfriend desperately begs.

But I can’t get into a beer garden with a rashie on, and can’t justify a 45-minute drive to the ocean for a six-minute stint on the sand.

Instead, I shelter in place, air-con blasting, watching videos about the soothing temperatures of deep space.

“Humans will likely never walk on Mercury due to the planet’s extreme temperatures, and high solar radiation,” an AI narrator says serenely. “It is unlikely that any living beings can withstand those conditions.”

Astronauts get a free pass to skip the hot planets, but I have to walk to the post office to collect my package before it closes at 5pm ... on a 35-degree day?

We all have a preferred route to the local shops. It might be the quickest, or along the most picturesque streets, or through the bush with the fewest – or most – discarded bongs. But for the melanin-deficient, our paths in summer must be chosen based on the sheer amount of shade.

I walk down the busiest and most hideous stretch of road in my suburb, sucking in petrol fumes, simply because it has awnings. When the awnings end, I dart between the shade of trees, sweating more profusely than Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in a BBC interview.

In such brutal conditions, I can go for coffee only before 9am, embryonically slick with two types of sunblock, and dressed like the invisible man – hats, sunglasses, anything to block the sun.

My mysteriously olive-skinned mother brags that I was never sunburnt while under her care because she would spray me with sunblock every single day before school. My sister, with her jet-black hair, doesn’t tan under fluoro lights like me.

I’m a day walker, meaning I’m not as ginger as some. My hair was extremely red as a kid, but in a dark room, I could pass for brown hair. Out in the sun, however, the body keeps the score.

Gingers inevitably learn the hard way that other countries don’t really have sunblock as we do in Australia. I still have tan lines from foolishly trusting bootleg Banana Boat in Bali more than a year ago.

In much of Europe, they don’t even sell sunblock. In Rome, I was offered tanning oil – either a sick joke or an actual murder attempt by the pharmacist.

I could strap tiny bottles of Australian-grade sunblock to my person and smuggle it onto the plane, but I don’t imagine Border Force would be happy to see me through the x-ray machine.

Australians with British ancestry often joke that the best thing their ancestors did was steal a loaf so they could be banished to paradise. One of my ancestors, James Duffin, has hung around in St Stephen’s Cemetery in Sydney’s Camperdown since 1878. His certificate of freedom notes “blue eyes” and “ruddy complexion”. Telltale signs of the recessive genetics I inherited.

I visited him recently (don’t worry, it was in winter) and had just one thought: “At least they have got him in the shade.”

The cemetery is also conveniently located next to some of the country’s most gentrified bakeries. Maybe, come March, I’ll visit James and pinch a $14 loaf of fenugreek-sesame sourdough – in the hope I can get a free ticket to a cooler climate.