YOU know the dream where you are at the office, or walking down a busy street, and you suddenly realise you are completely naked? The dream is supposed to be about shame and inadequacy, but I've long suspected that it's really about beach holidays. They can strike an unseasonal chill into the female heart, becauseunless you're a cabaret artiste or a modela bikini is the most revealing thing you are ever likely to wear in public. For many women, the prospect of a beach holiday is like getting an invitation to a wonderful party with fantastic people in a beautiful setting, and then seeing that it says “dress: underwear”.

It ought to be an unalloyed pleasure to be on a beach in the warm sun: not quite naturism, but still a communing of the body with nature that modern life mostly precludes. So why is the clear blue horizon so often clouded by a flicker of self-doubt? It's that modern malaise again, body image: whereas the body itself was the problem for Victorians, our obsession plays out inside the head, rather than in the drawing room. We live in a world that records and distributes images as never before, so that the freakish images of womanhood the media pumps out begin to seem normal. This is the time of year to remind yourself that they are not—neither the size-zero model nor the girl on page three.

Step one is to get a copy of “Fat is a Feminist Issue”, do some revision, and get angry—anger is the best defence against the fashion magazines that fetishise the new, creating a sense of inadequacy with our wardrobes and ourselves in order to propel us towards the shops with our wallets hanging out. And we need extra-strong defences now when there are articles everywhere telling us how to Get a Bikini Body in Just Six Weeks and ridiculing celebrities who have forgotten to hold in their tummies while on holiday. It's a pincer movement that can induce panic in grown-ups, even when we think we've got over ourselves.

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