These are not the words you want to hear on awkwardly 'fessing up to making a mess which you've made a bona fide attempt to try and clear up by yourself but have simply found you can't - no matter how badly you might have wanted to.

In my case, the mess involves hair dye on paintwork.

Yeah, this is why I don't dye my hair very often. In an attempt to avoid getting L'Oreal Brasilia (fancy hair-dye name for 'really, really dark brown') on the fixtures and fittings while covering up two months of rampant root regrowth, I covered the floor of the bathroom with newspaper, the sink with a dust sheet and as much of the door as I could cover with my own bath towel. I had cleaning products on-hand and a weather-eye on spills.

Despite all this vigilance, I still managed to get crud on the door. I think the back of my hair must have brushed lightly against it while the dye was developing, in the 2.5 seconds it wasn't in a rain hat thingy. There's now a nasty mark at about shoulder-level which is consistent with my hair brushing against the paintwork at... some point. I can't quite imagine when and am inclined to blame the fact that the free floor space in my landlady's bathroom is approximately the size of a postage stamp if I blame anything at all. That and a momentary slip. (I refuse to call it carelessness when I had newspaper and dust sheets everywhere.)

But accidents happen. I can't cover up everything when trying to touch my roots up. I have to put the rain cap thing on and take it off again. I have to clear away the newspaper and sheets before getting into the bath if I don't want the room to end up papier-mached. I can just do my best - and despite how hard I may try, doing my best won't stop accidents happening because that's called 'living'.

I spent well over half an hour trying to scrub the paintwork clean, while wearing a goddamn hot-pink bath towel. I got the worst of the cack off using common household cleaning products and a stray jeycloth, but I had to call it a day after, at a conservative estimate, half an hour, because it felt like my arm was about to fall off. In fact, it's still aching now. Once I realized I just wasn't going to be able to scrub away all the evidence because I simply didn't have the right product or the upper arm strength, I went down and explained what had happened to my landlady.

The response was 'What are you going to do about it?' and an old-fashoned look.

Okay, I wasn't expecting her to come over all Full House on me, but I'd at least have liked her to acknowledge that I firstly hadn't just walked out and left her to discover what had happened all by herself, and secondly that I'd done everything I could to try and clean up my own mess.

'What are you going to do about it?' just makes me wonder what the Hell else she thinks I should be able to do about something that's made to stain stuff living up to all expectations than 'try and clean it up'. Or how long she thinks I should spend scrubbing at something after my arm's gone numb. I really don't know what else I could have done, or what my landlady seems to think I should be doing about it. I would absolutely love not to have had to bother her with this. But it's happened, and nothing I can do can make it not-happen no matter how much I might like to.

I can't repaint the goddamn bathroom door at five minutes' notice, landlady. I've done all I can. If you think there's something else I should be doing, you tell me what it is.