Redder

It was a cool, overcast day that left me, despite the repeated application of SPF30, redder than a skinny-dipper at a ketchup factory.  Even for a man whose skin is generally whiter than his teeth, this is hard to understand.  The sun never managed to force its way through the clouds, the breeze never abated and yet my cream-caked conk managed to absorb enough UV to glow at such an intensity that will ensure that no aircraft will mistakenly land on my face in the foreseeable future.  The line left by my clothing leaves me looking like a vermillion man in a white T-shirt, with nipples.  I really don’t understand how I can occasionally lounge in the sun for hours and not burn whilst, it would seem, a few hours of total cloud cover leaves me looking like somebody has turned me inside out. 

It’s not the end of the world: the florid aspect of my battered dermis will subside after a couple of days – although not to a healthy-looking base tan, but to the kind of unhealthy pallor usually associated with a subterranean hermit.  A post-shower glance into the mirror normally finds me undistinguishable from the bathroom tiles, although rather more lumpy.  When God was handing out melanin, I must have been otherwise engaged.  I appear to have just enough to stop me being completely see-through.  On the beach I stand alone, the sun reflecting off my sleek and pigment-free skin, driving all of those about me back indoors.  Somewhere, half way across the universe, somebody is peering into a telescope, getting very excited about a brief flash of light from a far-distant planet: the sun reflecting off my ears.

And then, as I have mentioned, I ripen like a tomato: bright red and shiny in any patch not smothered in SPF goo.  There is no middle ground.  No delicate pink where others begin to tan, no healthy glow, just a simple switch from white to scarlet.  “Oh look, here comes the su… Oh bugger!”  My nose is always the first to go, along with – should they have been exposed – my knees, and no amount of protection outside of a ski balaclava and spats can stop it.  Cloud cover offers no respite: only rain and a full length oilskin could protect me.  Red hair comes along with white skin, and white skin transforms into red skin with the most meagre of exposure to UV rays.  I can burn in a nightclub.

I have no idea whether it is in any way linked, but in the winter I am always cold.  In the UK this means that I wear a coat for forty-eight weeks a year.  When I take it off, I burn.  As my skin turns puce, my hair turns blond – I have no idea why – perhaps the red pigment, whatever that might be, is drawn out of my hair and into my skin.  I am like an upside-down thermometer.  People wanting to know how warm it is simply ask me to take my hat off.

Age and wisdom (?) has taught me to pick my battles, and I cannot fight the sun.  It is too big, I could never beat it.  Discretion, they say, is the better part of valour.  I sit, discrete, in the dark, draped in a neck to ankle robe and sporting a large, floppy hat.  It is important to remain hydrated, so I drink gin… and I enjoy the summer.