Robert Mighall is a fortysomething former Oxford academic who is so obsessed with the sun that his neighbours call him “Gecko boy”, because he likes to sunbathe motionless on the highest point of his apartment building.

This compulsive, utterly idiosyncratic, unmistakably British little book is his attempt to explain the importance of the sun in the narrative of history. “If the Sun is God, then this is my version of his theology,” he states, rather grandly. At first the book does a good impression of Sensible and Useful. We go to ancient Egypt to visit the sun-loving Amenophis IV, and discover that Edward VII had his own sun lamp at Windsor castle. We are told about Dr Auguste Rollier's Swiss heliotherapy project that restored health and sunlight to the “malurbanised millions, blackened and blighted in slums and smoke”. We examine Germany's prewar “Naked Culture” with its bronzed youth “stomping through the flower-strewn meadows of the Fatherland”and hear about a group that met regularly in Essex in 1889 wearing nothing but sandals, calling each other Chong and Zex while “adoring the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within”. Meanwhile, Mighall is coming over as a nice English lecturer flicking through back editions of Health and Efficiency at the British Library.

And then the mania creeps in - starting with Stonehenge, which winds Mighall up a bundle. Stonehenge! The most famous and impressive Neolithic structure in the world, whose solar alignments imply that the sun served as its premier ritualistic and spiritual feature. Stonehenge! The fuss, the effort, the expense, the centuries spent constructing “an edifice whose raison d'etre is a moment when the sun is in a particular place and does a particular thing” - and then, on the actual original solstice itself, Mighall bets, it was overcast.

Ruined. Everything, ruined by the weather. Bloody bloody hell. “Even our word weather sounds like a question,” he cries, before randomly hitting us with some staggeringly pub-quiztastic facts, such as: Roman emperors dyed their robes purple using the secretions of rare snails harvested in the seas off the coast of Lebanon, and Belgians buy the most lottery tickets in the world when it's cloudy.

Ours is an eccentrically shaped island situated midway between four weather systems: westerly winds, stationary anticyclones, depressions, rain-bearing fronts. It is a miracle we're not all feeling our way through our earth tunnels with webbed fingers or communicating via sonar. British fiction is drenched in rain, says Mighall, as are our films, music and theatre. Angry Young Men at the Kitchen Sink? Who can blame them! Mighall has absolutely no time for Dustin Hoffman, say, in The Graduate - he had the Californian sun on his side, what's his freaking beef? For everyone in the UK the 1960s were “disgusting”. “Piss-headism and pissing down.” Mighall admires George Harrison's Here Comes the Sun for its lunatic optimism, but Jim Morrison's Waiting for the Sun is plain deceitful. “What - like a few hours, Jim? Sit it out in the desert, roll another joint, and it'll be here soon enough!”

Frequently, Mighall gets mystical and celebrates the “folk-art” of sunbathing. “Beneath the grey paving stones of drudgery and duty are the golden sands of authentic self-hood,” he breathes, then quotes Evelyn Waugh, DHLawrence, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen on the benefits of a warm day. There are those such as Jeremy Paxman and Oscar Wilde who think the sun ought to be avoided because it isn't good for rigorous thought (try telling that to Euripides, Paxo) but why fight it, guys? It's biology. We love to tan because of neurological reactions between the skin and the brain - endorphins and all that.

Mighall is sweetly amateurish (“this is more a work of poetics than physics”) and over the course of the book conducts his own random little surveys, asks his next-door neighbour's kid for advice and expects expats in Marbella spontaneously to come to a cafe to answer questions (they don't). Essentially, the book is all feeling, radiating energy and nerves, with tantalising glimpses of Mighall's personal life spent wrestling with a SAD lamp and scrawling his diary through the grim summer of 2007 (“this can't be right. This isn't right...”).

Mighall knows, as we all do, that the weather here in old Angleterre is sensate. That it is maliciously aware it's the weekend or a bank holiday. His intense sympathy for us all is superseded only by his wild love of Keats, which comes spilling out, aflame, as he describes the tragic poet taking his brother on a mini-break to Devon in April 1818, then lying listening to the rain pounding the roof of their rented cottage at night “with a sense of being drowned and rotted like a grain of wheat”. All the consumptive John had to look forward to, of course, was a catastrophic sun-seeking dash to Rome a couple of years later - sea voyage with vomit, quarantine in Naples, death. Keats needed easyJet. We all do, apparently. Out of the 80m passengers on European low-cost airlines, 60m start or wind up in the UK.

By the end, Mighall is actively welcoming global warming and challenging the climate to do its worst, soon. I mean, why keep up this perpetual striptease? Off he slopes to talk to a Dr Stott in Reading about the impending cosmic meltdown, but is distracted by the happy students on the sunny university lawns playing Frisbee, “indifferent to their doom” - by which he means not knowing that the tide of the 2007 summer was poised to turn against them that very evening. Like the Home Guard Battalion looking out for the Luftwaffe, Mighall raises his face to the skies, and sets his jaw.

Sunshine by Robert Mighall
J Murray £16.99 pp277

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