Although I tend to fail, I try my best each summer to avoid getting
sunburnt. One tricky aspect is driving in the car with the sun
shining on my hands. Ideally I don't want to put sunscreen on them
every time I drive (and recent revelations have pointed out how
figures for comparing the effectiveness of Australian sunscreen
brands have been widely meaningless anyway due to dishonest testing
labs), so in an extra mark of strangeness I've taken to wearing
gloves when driving. Yes I'm the last man standing who actually
keeps gloves in his glovebox!
But still there's a problem since while turning the steering wheel
my long shirt sleeves get pulled back and reveal a gap of exposed
skin between the glove and the cuff of my shirt. So I spend whole
journeys pulling my shirt sleeve back or trying to hide my arm
under a shadow.
What I need are gloves with a long neck to cover my sleeve.
Unfortunately there are few enough places that sell you regular
gloves these days, let alone specialty ones. In theory there are
gauntlet gloves, very thick things now sold to motorbike riders
rather than medieval knights. Or masonic gloves, so you don't get
your cuffs dirty if the secret handshake goes too far. Or American
cowboy gloves which, for those of you thinking I'm a sissy, show
that coyboys are sun-safe too.
The almighty internet will of course supply all those things, but
without the rather essential ability to try them on first and see
if they'll really work for me. So, always afraid of wasting my
money, I've been looking and comparing and procrastinating all year
about what to buy.
As is often the case I eventually settled on the ideal answer of
"none of them". All I need is to add an extension onto an existing
pair of gloves, and in Alexandra on my holiday I actually found a
second-hand pair for $5 in a junk shop that perfectly suited such
abuse. I just needed to try and guess how to sew again, or cheat by
threading with small steel wires as usual. But it occourred to me
last night that I don't even need to extend the gloves, just wear
something under them that extends back up my arm.
In fact a sock with a hole cut before the heel for my fingers to go
through, and then the rest cut off after the heel leaving another
hole for my thumb, seems to work great. I can even just about slide
them on at the same time as putting on the gloves, and the neck of
the sock pulls nicely back up my arm. Worn-out socks even come with
the finger hole pre-made!
So this summer I'm going to exceed my existing strangeness of
wearing gloves on my hands to drive, and wear socks on them too.
Others might prefer getting their car windows tinted, but I never
quite liked the feeling of isolation from outside that you get
behind tinted windows, and they only make it harder to see the
things you're running into. At some point all these neat little
ideas of mine must add up to madness, but so long as nobody's
around to judge, I might as well be a happy madman.
