COLOUR

"The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most" John Ruskin (1819-1900)


Why am I blogging about colour? Because it's all around us right now during the most colourful season of all. The trees, although they're losing their leaves fast with the rain and wind in recent days, have been glorious. From green, through lime, yellow, gold, orange and red to brown. From south-west right round to north-east on the colour wheel. A designer's rainbow.

And it's not just the leaves. The sky just a minute ago, straight after a rain storm, was a washed out palette of blues and pinks so delicate you could almost smell them. Now there's a thought; does colour have a smell?

Close your eyes and think about this. What comes to mind when you think of a colour? Does red smell of earth, does yellow smell of hot skin, warmed by the sun? Does blue smell of ozone and green of grass?

It's interesting to mix up the senses when thinking of descriptions. Such as sharp grey, allegro lemon, loud edges, a sour building, cool birdsong. Gives a whole new perspective on things doesn't it?

Ice

Shards of glittering sharpness. Cold, pointed, smooth. Ice cubes for my gin and tonic. Crushed ice for keeping fish counters cold. Icebergs and the Titanic – fatal. Icebergs and polar bears - essential. Ice floes and glaciers. Snappy, short, crisp sounds. Ice picks for chipping blocks and for murdering people. Miss Blue in the refrigerator with the ice pick for Cluedo.

An icy character – withdrawn, unfriendly, unsympathetic. Blue eyes and sharp features. No smile; no frown. Clearly drawn angles and high cheekbones. Icy cold demeanour. The bad guy; no-one’s friend. The assassin – cold as ice and completely focussed.

Icy lake for winter skaters. Blades that cut through the ice keeping the skater upright. Pirouettes and jumps and whirls.

Crackling like ice – breaking up, falling through into the icy blackness. Black ice causing accidents and multi-car pile ups.

Lemons

So I gotta write something long and reasonably put-together about lemons. The thing that, naturally, immediately sprang to mind when someone mentioned this challenge was gin and tonic.

So I had a G&T. While I thought about lemons. Yellow, sort of spherical shaped, shiny and uneven, like a pock marked face. Yes, a jaundiced pock marked face. That's it exactly.

So I had another G&T. While I thought about lemons some more. Make you suck your cheeks in. Your pock marked cheeks that is. Ahah - cheeks. Baby's bums with dimples in them. Hmm - don't know much about that - no kids.

So I had another G&T. God. Why didn't I ever have kids? What have I missed in life? I'm gonna cry. I am crying. Tears the shape of lemons. I need another G&T.

I'm in the hospital. I got up to pour another G&T and slipped on the lemon and twisted my bloody ankle. The ambulance men were nice though - they had lemon coloured jackets...

The House

The sky sunk like a hot, wet blanket, smothering the day into darkness; the fields, trees and the hills beyond merged into one another like paint running on a wet canvas; but still it didn’t rain.

I was about half a mile from the house, fascinated as I always am at the changes wrought by the weather on the landscape. My T-shirt stuck to my back in the humidity and I felt sweat trickling under my hairline as I gazed towards the shadowy horizon, trying to make out the shapes of the low hills that populated it.

I leaned back against the stone wall, trying to soak up some coolness from the rough surface, but even the stones themselves seemed to radiate warmth as if in attempt to keep any coolness they contained to themselves.

It had been four days now. Four days of unremitting clammy heat. The whole of nature seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to be released in one great, gasping gush of cool air.

I pushed myself away from the wall with an effort and turned towards the gate to walk up the slight incline that led back to the lane. The lane ended at the house that had been my temporary home now for two months and I approached it, as always, with care, making sure everything was as it had been when I’d come out three hours ago.

But this time something was different. I moved to the hedge line and stopped, trying to work out what it was that had alerted me. The gate was shut as it should be. There was no sign of any car. The house rested in the turgid air, silent and watchful. But something was wrong. I took a couple of steps forward, still keeping close to the hedge, gaining some cover from the drooping branches. And there it was; movement caught briefly where there should have been none; and from inside the house.

Chimneys and Broadband

I’m sitting in my kitchen with the laptop, no broadband and no phone and my house is over-run by strange people and loud noises.

We’re having the chimney lined after all sorts of scare stories about the risk of chimney fires, the chance that the interior brick lining of the chimney’s going to crumble away etc. etc. A couple of months ago when we had the chimney swept I had a good look at the stuff that came down – huge chunks of black, vitreous stuff, the product of too many pine logs burned in the wood burner. It’s quite possible apparently for this stuff to catch fire in the chimney so I put a ban on use of the wood burner until we had it done – much to the disgust of my husband who was convinced it wasn’t really necessary but just a ploy of the chimney sweeping company to make a sale. But he does love his wood burner when the days get cold so eventually, with winter just over the horizon and the thought of another exciting delivery of logs, he gave in. How many people like stacking humungous amounts of logs tidily in the wood shed? Must be a guy thing!

It’s pretty well a whole day’s job and the room where the woodburner’s located is in the middle of the house so I get stuck either on the side where my study, bedroom and loo is, or in the kitchen. Accepting the fact that I’d be spending most of the day making cups of tea and coffee for the workmen, I decided to de-camp to the kitchen with my laptop.

The young guy is up the ladder on the roof, feeding a bloody great silver tube down the chimney while the boss of the operation’s in the sitting room yelling up the chimney to his mate and guiding the silver snake round the inevitable bends (why do they always put bends in chimneys?). While the young guy’s on the roof I get him to dig up the pine tree that’s decided to take root in the brickwork at the top of the chimney. My husband’s been threatening to do that for nearly a year now, since it was just a little tiny treelet, but the pitch of the roof and the fear of heights seemed to put him off. They tell me that if we’d left it there it would eventually have become a full-grown Scots pine growing out of the middle of our house (or what little would be left of it). Actually, thinking about it, it sounds quite fun.

While all this is going on the BT man turns up to try and sort out my broadband which has decided it doesn’t want to share a line with the telephone thank you very much and huffily switches itself off every time someone picks up the ‘phone. That and being abysmally slow (half a megabyte would you believe due to the distance we are from the exchange!) has been thoroughly tweeking my nerves of late.

Now I have broadband back and the phone works too. The chimney’s lined, the roof tree’s been removed and everything’s back where it oughta be. I’m off for a walk with Misty!!

Sea Bass

My hands leaning on the bench either side of the wooden board, I looked down at it. It looked back at me, its single, bright, black eye unblinking.

Rounded nose, a good 18 inches long; this was undoubtedly a wild fish - a wolf of the sea - grown long and sleek, powered by its voracious appetite for young and smaller fish in the warm water around the shoreline. Greenish-black and silver scales clothed the once-powerful body that had spent its days prowling the surf, forcing through the breaking waves, riding the currents, hunting food to provide fuel for energy.

I picked up my filleting knife and started work on the line-caught sea bass, one of a boxful that had just been delivered from Cornwall, all of them tagged so they could be traced to the fisherman who caught them. I took my time, not wanting to give anything but my best work to this beautiful fish. As the flesh came away from the bone the aroma of ozone-laden sea air wafted upwards, a promise of the intense flavour that would reward the diner who had just ordered this simple but exquisite dish of pan fried sea bass fillet served on a bed of sliced tomatoes from Spain, sweet and drenched in sun-ripened flavour.

My First Novel

Well, I'm gonna write it sometime. And right now's sometime!

I was searching around looking for inspiration and I suddenly remembered something I'd started a couple of years ago on an Open University short course. The problem was to find where on earth I'd put it. I searched through all the files on my computer and found the first chapter. Sitting down reading it I realized I'll have to make some changes (complete re-write!) but it's a good base to start from. And then, blow me down with a feather, I found the last few paragraphs of the last chapter. How on earth had I managed to write the beginning and the end (typical of me) and where for God's sake was the middle? Arghhh!

I started going through all my old notepads which are full of freewrites, journaling, moans and sketches, looking for anything that might fill the gap (and gaps don't get much larger than this one). And there, on the last two pages of an old, battered Paperchase e-co A4 notebook, I found the bare bones of a complete plotline through 18 chapters.

And my heroine? Why, none other than Sadie Larson, sassy, gobby private detective...