Someday soon, lying naked on a glass bed having ultraviolet rays ten times more powerful than our sun bake your epidermis will appear in the Bonkers Book of Beauty along with Elizabethans whitening their faces with lead. Someday soon, I hope, people will no more spend their leisure time being radiated in high street outlets called Tanz In ’Ere or Sun of the Beach than they would take a dip in the cooling pool of a nuclear power plant.

Until then as I walk through my local municipal leisure centre to the swimming pool, I must pass the “solarium” — with its associations of health and vitality — where, given sufficient dedication and purchase of brass tokens, a person might acquire a malignant melanoma. Later I will drive home past the London teaching hospital whose department of dermatology will remove it, hopefully in time. Thus my council tax having funded the genesis of a life-threatening cancer, my income tax will be used to treat it.

This week the Government promised to consider a ban on smoking in cars containing children, a heavy-handed approach and ludicrously unpoliceable. Expect excuses like: “What you can smell, officer, is the fag I had before I picked them up from Brownies.”

If the Government is seeking a straightforward improvement in public health, and a fortune saved on treating the second-biggest cancer among the under-35s, it should finally put some legislative restraint on the tanning industry.

Hot bright June days make me think of Daniel, my husband’s best friend. It was four years ago this month that he died of malignant melanoma. What struck me, as his illness progressed, was how it had begun with such a piffling first symptom: a freckle on his back. You’d expect a persistent cough, a blazing headache, a lump, to augur some deep bodily crisis. But this was so disproportionate, a hideous joke. How could cancer radiate from this one superficial blemish? And yet it did, like a bush fire.

As a teenager, Daniel was often ribbed about being pale, a bit gingery, with one of those northern complexions that the sun only ever fries. So he’d go to tanning salons before his holiday, try to get some colour down at what the Scousers call ’lecky beach. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) estimates that 100 skin cancer deaths a year can be put down to the use of sunbeds. Indeed you increase your risk of getting a melanoma by 75 per cent if you use one.

But it doesn’t feel like the real sun, does it, with your eyes in those little blue goggles. And the lamps have been made stronger of late so 20 minutes of slipping about on that bed can give as much DNA-warping UV power as a blazing day in Tenerife.

That, of course, is the point of a suntan; it makes you look as if you’ve been somewhere, even if you were just sweating in a grubby booth off the Walworth Road. Reading interviews with so-called “tanorexics” — women so addicted to tanning that they feel depressed if their skin colour goes lighter than their handbags — one remarked that “pale people look like they need something extra in their lives”.

And that missing factor is fun. A tan suggests an ease with life, the leisure to sit and laugh, that you are not toiling and straining away indoors through every sun-lit hour: you have escaped. Being tanned not only whitens teeth, evens the blotches and slims the limbs, it also makes you look richer. The patina of wealth — the tan of Branson or Beckham or, these days, Blair — is not dark and leathery like a sozzled no-life expat, or red and forced like a sun-bingeing wage slave. It is even and honeyed, being achieved almost incidentally on the slopes, the upper deck, at a breezy terrace lunch by the Med.

Once it was enough to ape that moneyed glow a fortnight a year. Now the celebrity magazines show stars with tans that never fade, grooming is remorseless and all year round. And so the young of Glasgow and Leeds nuke their hides to make like starlets in Cannes. You would think they’d prefer the spray-on salons now that the chemicals don’t smell like digestive biscuits. But they don’t care about the burn or the risk. They want it real.

What’s a bit of cancer to a generation blasé about boob jobs, Botox or a tattooist’s needle, prepared to have cheapo abdominal surgery in a foreign country to get rid of a post-baby tum? And the tanning industry preys on their dauntless vanity.

Twenty sessions a year is the safe limit, according to dermatologists — not that you’d ever find a skin doc on a sunbed — but tanning shops don’t keep a tally. The World Health Organisation recommends that under-18s should not use sunbeds at all, since skin burnt when young is more likely to produce cancers. But few salons bother to check age. Anyhow, many of the beds are coin operated: put a quid in the slot and repeat as often as your pain threshold allows. Pale folks with a high cancer risk are supposed to be advised to stay away, but salons will take their money anyway.

Members of the tanning industry body, The Sunbed Association, promised to adhere to a code of conduct but researchers at Which? magazine, visiting salons incognito, found that few follow the rules. And since they can’t be trusted to self-regulate, the independent government advisory committee Comare (Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment) yesterday proposed legislation — including preventing the under-18s from using salons.

Working for The Sunbed Association must be like speaking out for the arms trade or British American Tobacco. Our product is safe, even efficacious, says its website, quoting Vitamin D deficiencies in gloomy Scottish towns. It doesn’t mention that skin cancer has knocked cervical cancer off the No 2 spot in the women’s oncological hit parade. Or that by the time you get around to checking out that funny freckle you could already be stuffed: that the cancer cells might be marching unstoppably through the lymph and already be setting up shop in other organs. Or that being young and otherwise healthy only means the cancer cells multiply quicker, the tumours suck your life away faster.

Daniel was only 41. I saw his two youngest daughters last weekend and wondered at how much growing up they’ve already done without him. Such a stupid cancer, such a frivolous, avoidable cause. It’s time now that we packed up ’lecky beach.

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