Pink or Brown

I don't think I've ever had a 'tan' in my life.

I've tried to limit my exposure to the galactically insignificant slow fusion reaction near the centre of Earth's orbit, through a careful choice of pastimes and career moves. When I was hospitalised due to the the alien baby in my abdomen, medical professionals unanimously agreed that I was clearly anaemic. Mother tried to explain that I just spent a lot of time in dark rooms with computers, but they didn't believe her until the blood tests came back. Then they looked at me funny like.

Regrettably one must on occasion venture outside in order to procure staples such as vaseline and rubber gloves, when one runs out at the weekend, as one does. It is then that the star attacks, firing trillions of photons per second into its unsuspecting victim's skin. Some of us have a superior skin organ, one that can cope with such a vicious and unprovoked assault. I am not one of those 'us'. Instead I have freckles: an evolutionary prank and ironically a provoking factor in vicious assaults at schools. I think a quote what is quoted in wikipaedia is beneficial here:

In the United Kingdom, which lies at a northern latitude, descendants of the Britons have white skin. When their skin is exposed to the meager sunlight, the scant amount of melanin their skin produces is unable to block the sunlight.

I think you'll find the sunlight in the Untied Kingdom of Grate-Bittern and Northern Ire-land is 'meagre', thank you very much.

Foolishly I'd assumed that my freckles, coaxed out of hiding by the increased light in Freedom, would protect me from harm in the Royal Gizzard of Berkshire. Not so. A day spent in a park playing hacky-sack with friends (and sometimes small children whose parents seemed to think we were running an activity based creche) turned me day-glo (TM) pink. My skin must be returning to a believable shade already though, because it wasn't until well into this morning's festivities that the dental nurse noticed it, and after that we all conspired to cover it in fragments of my teeth and spittle anyway.