I have moved to lynnroberts.org

I did something quite uncharacteristic over the weekend. I preened.

It was my twenty-three-teenth birthday on Sunday, I had a joint party with fellow Maglabber Rachel in the trendy Cardiff bar, Buffalo, on Saturday night. Since it was a special occasion I ignored my teeny £35-a-week budget and bought a rather lovely gold silk dress from Kate Moss's Topshop range.

Gold goes really nicely with red hair. It does not, however, go particularly well with the whiter-than-white Celtic skin that comes part-in-parcel with the ginger gene. In fact it made me look like either a ghost or someone with acute liver failure depending on the light. Thus, I decided to try fake tanning. After ignoring very sensible advice, "go to a salon and get a spray tan," from a fellow redhead, I took to the shower for some serious exfoliation.

Not being one to make this much effort usually, I don't have any of the equipment. My sister, a veteran fake-tanner, said I needed 'exfoliating gloves'. I don't know what these are. Instead I decided a nail brush would do just as well... they are after all a bit scratchy. Doing my legs was easy enough, as were my chest, arms and shoulders. Trying to 'exfoliate' (scratch the skin off) your back with a tiny 99p nailbrush is no easy task, and in the end I gave up.

Next I had to spray ridiculously expensive liquid evenly over myself, which I thought I did rather well. Again the back proved to be a bit of an issue, not really being sure of the standard procedure I held the spray can over my shoulder and waved it about a bit. That'd do.

Then came the waiting game. My Facebook status is testament to the length of time it took: "Lynn is wondering why she hasn't changed colour yet," came 3 hours after application. Things started happening about 3 hours after that at 6pm. There was a minor splodging incident in my armpit, but I saw to that with some more nail-brush scratching, and by the time I was ready to leave at 7.30 I was feeling rather smug about what a nice colour I was.

Off I went, to the trendy bar with all the trendy people. I started my kindly-friends-funded cocktail consumption with a Vicious Bitch and ended it with a Strawberry Iced Tea with a good few more in between. I ended up raving in the rain into the wee small hours before stumbling homeward via the chippy.

My surprise came the next morning. Having woken up at a ridiculously early 8am a bleary-eyed glance in the bathroom mirror told me that my 'tan' had continued to develop through the evening and into the night. I looked a bit weird, and worst of all had a bruise-like smudge on my neck which I sincerely hope had been covered by my hair the night before. More nail-brush scratching later, I am just about back to where I started and determined to embrace being pale and interesting.

---- Incidentally, this relentless ageing was already a cause for concern before I read India Knight's most recent Times column in which she says: "the time when you are most likely to conceive with no complications and have a healthy baby, is when you are young, which means late teens or early twenties." A recent discussion among the Maglab girls concluded that 27, 28 and 29 is late twenties; 24, 25, 26 is mid; which means, according to India, I only have 364 days left to give birth. Oh God. ----