Sylvia Patterson on suntans

Imagine lying down every day for a fortnight in front of an electric fire, three bars blazing, almost naked, the only respite from this violent assault on your perfectly lovely skin provided by some moustachioed buffoon in leatherette jodhpurs cheating on his wife in a 4000-page Jilly Cooper epic. This, to me, is the definition of a beach holiday, and it's time we stopped the madness.

There we are, year in, year out, spending our precious time and dwindling wages lying semi-conscious on a sun lounger, oblivious to nature's splendour, limbs askew like four giant salamis attached to a boiled haggis. While adding synthetic oils to our very own layers of toxin-related personal oils and hoping, by the end of approximately 100 hours of radioactive flambé endeavour, someone will find us intoxicatingly attractive, or indeed "radiantly healthy". And yet, still, year in, year out, this is what we call paradise.

In 2008, the standard beach holiday remains as popular as ever, the only change in our nationwide habits being our most popular destination. For purely financial reasons, since the pound plummeted in Europe, Turkey is the new Spain, as announced this week by the Co-operative Travel Company which has seen a "seismic change" in bookings - for the first time since the 1960s Spain has lost its position as No.1 package holiday destination.

Sunshine, though, remains the priority despite our contemporary obsessions with certain death by skin cancer or, what's even worse to many, looking 15 minutes older than you actually are at the age of 25. Which is also why we're simultaneously living in a world gone increasingly orange where we never see the suddenly quaint vision of a normal bare white leg (or, for most people in Scotland, a leg the colour of the pastel options inside a box of Edinburgh rock: white, yellow, pink or blue, depending on the weather.) Fluorescent orange is the only colour which counts for anyone under 30, or, as is often the case, a striking combination of copper, brown and deeply burnt orange streaking down the legs in a dubious patchwork like the harlequin leggings on a merrie court jester in 1563. And the legs on Charlotte Church's rugby playing boyfriend are considerably worse.

Today, the sight of a bronze-buffed torso means you've probably not, in actual fact, been swinging on a hammock in Turkey, but standing in a queue in Superdrug, the last 12 months seeing sales of fake tans in Superdrug alone escalate by 40% while fake tan products everywhere have doubled in the last three years. Despite, it must be said, no known evidence of a person bearing a permanent all-over Ready-Brek Glow being considered anywhere near attractive.

Fake tan for some of us, certainly, is less "transformed into J-Lo overnight despite being descended from 16 generations of Pitlochry fish farmers", more "coal miner after a shaft explosion in the 1920s on his way to a primitive burns unit".

A real tan, meanwhile, to some of us (i.e. me) is even worse, with prolonged exposure to the scorching sun looking less like kissed, more all-over pranged with the bottom of a frying pan pulled straight from the cooker and immediately pressed onto the skin. Followed by, a few hours later, after the inevitable post-sun showering trauma which makes your head explode, walking into a Mediterranean bar full of Mediterranean hunks to find boys don't make passes at girls with faces like molten molasses.

I should've stayed, perhaps, a goth with a bad attitude as was the case on my first and only Club 18-30 holiday, to Ibiza aged 18 ("forced" by a sun-loving chum), where two weeks were spent in pale-faced indignation under a tree by the pool looking a great deal like Mary The Punk off EastEnders in black leggings, black t-shirt and black winkle picker boots buckled half way up the leg. And a four foot toilet chain wrapped around the wrist for a "laugh".

Such an attitude would've spared me, certainly, the horror yet to come in 1991 after falling asleep on a beach in Australia, face up and topless, just as the world was awaking to a brand new concept known as "the hole in the ozone layer".

On stirring four hours later, the hole in the ozone layer was concluded to be directly above my head as the unfiltered rays had lifted up the skin from the whole front torso and transformed it into a layer of inch thick blisters, like a chest-sized sheet of bubble-wrap you definitely would not pop.

Two weeks were spent, therefore, unable to wear a bra while walking around bent double at the waist lest any piece of hastily bought, flimsy and enormous clothing accidentally brush the bubbles on top of the scarlet skin. Curiously, that "radiantly healthy" compliment never came.

Even less surprisingly, ever since, a three-day holiday in a European city, in the rain, wearing a fetching raincoat while pretending to be Audrey Hepburn and swooning over bonkers buildings has held considerably more appeal.

Meanwhile, back at the Superdrug counter, those bewildering aliens we call The Youth continue to believe the world looks at its very best while everyone in it looks "Tangoed".

Or, as another ad first announced back in 1994 with a curiously prophetic accuracy: The future's bright, the future's Orange.