I’m an SPF50+ redhead. Walk a mile in my shoes, but never in daylight
My convict ancestor’s certificate said “blue eyes” and “ruddy complexion”. At least they buried him in the shade.
Opinion
December 30, 2025 — 3.00pm
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.”
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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.
