Fashions come and fashions go. It was considered desirable to be pale and interesting, while it was the domain of more rural, hard-working oafs to be baked brown under an unforgiving sun.

I’ve just had a week’s out-of-season sunshine and believe me, forget any fears of melanoma, the tables have well and truly turned on this one.

And, leaving aside the question of just why a sea of school kids are free to join their young, well-heeled, well-bronzed parents in term time, it’s clear other fashion trends have shifted.

That the world and his wife are now inked to within an inch of their lives, or at least an inch of their body parts isn’t surprising to me. Tattoos, once almost entirely the sole domain of old sea dogs, are now de rigueur for the majority of today’s youth and a good few older folks, who should know better.

One fellow holidaymaker I was on talking terms with, shaven-headed to give maximum space for artistic ink, shared with me his latest addition. Like a youngster, who takes a fresh sheet of paper for special colouring in, he proudly pulled out his bottom lip to display a small, but perfectly formed, trio of swallows in full flight, perfectly tattooed inside his mouth. As I say, fashions shift and each to their own, but I don’t need a Hilda Ogden display in my oral cavity.

However, even more baffling than internal tattoos was the latest craze I witnessed for truly immense, enormous trout-pout lips. At first I wondered if all pouters had migrated to Gran Canaria at the same time, or perhaps this is the world centre for such treatments, but having queued at Gatwick passport control, I can confirm a nationwide trend of staggering proportions.

And it’s not just the young who feel this need to plump, and over-extend their pout – the fashion has been adopted by all age groups, although in my experience it is so far confined to the female gender.

Just as fashions trends shift regularly so does society’s idea of beauty and anyway, as we all know, it’s firmly in the eye of the beholder. But, what makes women think this trend, particularly taken to extremes, is an attractive look?

Tattoos I actually get, piercings of all shapes and sizes I also accept to a degree but the need to artificially create such protruded lips baffles me. Maybe the trend has been born from the new need to pout so positively for social media sites, but whatever it is, lips are swelling at an alarming rate.