Sunscreen Habit Vindicated Once Again

So Alban--my Seminarian Pretend Son, remember--and I were walking past the Grassmarket towards the West Port to browse the used bookstores. Alban was wearing his usual Young Fogey clothes, and I was wearing my hair in a braid crown  and a  vintage 1950s jacket in that very 1950s green colour Alban says is called "eau de nil."  (Alban knows his colours.) And along came a rockabilly, hipster-looking chap who beamed at us. presumably believing that we, too, were rockabilly hipsters.

"You two look very sharp together," he said.

Not my husband Benedict Ambrose, Alban is into blood sports.

"Thank you," we said.

"Together," I thought. "Hee hee hee!"

I was 17 when Alban was born.

Sunscreen! Yes!

As a matter of fact,  I was wearing SPF 15 today, in my MAC moisturizing foundation. (At my august age, I have decided that, lifelong habit of sunscreen or no, it is time for foundation.)  Yesterday I rushed inside for a big straw hat, sunglasses and my bottle of SPF 50 waterproof sunscreen when I got home from Mass, for Benedict Ambrose and I had a Sunday Lunch in front of the Historical House, and the sun poured down as if to make up hysterically for its poor behaviour all August.

Sadly, we had planned for Sunday Lunch to be rainy and cold, so we had made cold-weather food: hot dill soup, hot pork roast, hot peas, hot potatoes, hot gravy and choice of hot apricot crumble or hot rhubarb crumble to be followed by hot coffee and chocolates. But nobody complained at the autumn fare. I think we were all stunned by our atmospheric good fortune.

All the same, I was relieved when the sun calmed down a bit and I could remove my hat and sunglasses. Going up and down three flights of sandstone stairs repeatedly in a big floppy hat is no picnic.