This. Means. War.

Not many people know this about me, it’s not like I harp on about it all the time but I was, literally, born to have a good tan. Mongolian Blue Spot, they call it, and it’s a real thing, you can google it. It appears like a birthmark upon arrival into this world, and is mostly seen on the bums of Native Americans, Polynesians and Asians. But the really exciting anomaly is when it appears on white folk, like me. Legend has it that if a Caucasian baby is born with a ‘blue butt’ as the Japanese call it, then it is nature harking back to some ‘dubious’ ancestry, as my family like to jest... Or that one of my great great great great great great grandparents just so happened to be Dutch Polynesian, according to my mother's scrupulous family tree climbing.

I am very grateful for my lineage. It means that I tan extremely easily, and I don’t mind trying. I’m browner of skin than my sibling, because they weren’t touched by the blue spot. It takes about four minutes for tan lines to appear. It’s a skill I’m very proud of, and as such, I’m very accustomed to worshipping the sun, as seen here, on a boat in Antigua, thank you very much.

But now, all hell has broken loose. Gareth and I, in our little chapel flat, don’t have a garden.  But we do have a little flat roof outside the sitting room windows, and on the rare occasion that I was at home on a sunny Saturday, I was partial to a bit of a lay down.

This morning, my landlord emailed me to let me know that the landlord of the flat below had spotted me sunbathing and demanded to know what on earth I thought I was doing putting all nine of my stones on his precious little roof. There was photographic evidence attached to the email. That’s right, he’d taken my photo.

Aside from feeling rather violated at having been watched in this voyeuristic manner, I’m absolutely devastated. I sunbathe, therefore I am. I can not not sunbathe. What will become of me? I’ll shrivel up and turn white, or worse, a kind of off-yellow colour a bit like jaundice, like I do in the winter.

I have two options and I’ve already advanced one of them, probably the wrong one but I was angry. I should have just started looking for other places to live. A bit of a bind, but sunshine is imperative.

Instead, I launched a counter attack on the other landlord.

‘He doesn’t want me to sunbathe? Oh yeah?’ I wrote, although slightly less childishly. I insinuate toughness now for comic effect. (I don't need to tell you that Gareth went over my email and 'calmed it down,' as he put it.)

‘Well, how about he gets his tenants in the flat below ours to shut the hell up once in a while? When they play Boyz 2 Men at 2am so loudly that the bass reverberates our floors, I’m pretty sure the entire chapel shakes. Oh, and while I’m at it, they’re using the car park for some wheelin and dealin’, there is litter everywhere and they probably smell. So there!’

I totally won.