I personally don’t like yellow. I find it conjures up unpleasant images of things I don’t really enjoy very much, like earwax and worrying if my teeth look like it.
Of course, it does have its uses, without yellow there would be no orange or green. In light of this, and also thanks to the relentless insistence of someone who shall here remain nameless, I suppose I cannot dismiss yellow so readily, and so, I am now considering the contradiction that is yellow.
In my admittedly bad habit of being a hasty judge, I forgot about some truly brilliant yellow things; of course egg yolk, especially of a 4 minute boiled egg; daffodils – I don’t know why I like daffodils so much, but I think it’s because a bunch only costs a pound and they are very simple, and the thought of spending more than that on something that will wither and die in 5-7 days makes me fell just awful on a number of levels; this chic wallpaper panel that I pasted in at the beginning; and ultimately, Spongebob Squarepants, who over the years and to my own endless amusement, I have become familiar with also as Bob L’Eponge, Bob Esponja and SpongeBob Schwammkopf, depending on my locale.
Not to get too distracted, horrible yellow things and their unpleasant associations are quite numerous, we can include yellow fever, smilies, ageing, rotting, decay, jaundice, cowardice, old toenails, flouro jackets. Yellow also renders other perfectly good colours unpalatable - to combine yellow and black makes danger, as in wasps and small poisonous frogs and police tape. With red, it is just disgusting, as in infected spots and scabs, a promise of much worse to come. And let’s not forget yellow cars or that stupid Coldplay song.
There is an awful lot of theory around colour and personal responses to it that I didn’t know about until I started to write this. Apparently every person responds differently to colours, and it has been proven to all be linked with individual personality. A colour I do like is red. I’m not sure what these things mean, perhaps because I am a philistine, or perhaps because sometimes you just like a thing and dislike another thing and don’t always have to psychoanalyse it.
So, in conclusion, I have found that it is true that yellow is more often than not ghastly, but in certain circumstances has been known to produce fabulous results. I still don’t like it though, and here’s a quote from Edgar Degas, who was a well-respected realist painter in the 1800’s, and so clearly knew a thing or two:
‘What a horrible thing yellow is.’
Night
I used to think nothing worth happening happened till the sun went down. Now that I’m marginally less ignorant and my days are a bit more roast dinner than salad, that’s just embarrassing.
Though clearly the night does bring with it many appealing contrasts to that of the day.
It’s dark for a start. I love the dark. Daylight’s great as well, you’ve got to love daylight (except when you’re seeing it before you’ve been to bed and you can’t remember your name, or where you live. That’s not good.). But I love how the darkness and orange glow from the streetlights morph the familiar into the unrecognisable. Combined with our heightened senses, there is an eerie quality, peculiar to the night. Left to my own devices my imagination runs wild; the moving shadows, the footsteps in the distance, the amplified sounds, the feeling of being alone and the worry of not being as alone as I think I am. And this strangeness makes me feel more alive. If nothing else, the darkness provides an apt change of scenery for the other, less obvious contrasts to unfold.
Apart from bank holidays, the night is the only time when the shops are closed. In the wee small hours when even the kebab places and burger vans are packed up and only the 24 hour supermarkets and petrol stations are open, we are as free as we will ever be from the relentless opportunity to shop. Of course, most of us are sleeping then, but we can sleep better knowing that free from commerce we remain. Unless of course you have the Internet, because that’s 24/7. But no one’s holding a gun to your head. You could just read the news or find out everything you ever wanted to know about feral children. Or shop, if you want, it’s up to you. It could save you a trip to the unforgiving and vastly more enticing, impulse-buy arena of the frenzied shopping centre, thus also happily reducing your carbon footprint as you would probably have taken your car, unless of course, your online purchase, which was made in china, is going to be delivered all the way from New Zealand.
Night is the time that we associate with pleasure. The day is reserved for work but come nightfall and the time belongs to us once more. You are free to do as you please. You can do something, or nothing, whatever takes your fancy. Your nothing might be somebody else’s something. It doesn’t really matter if it’s something or nothing that you’ll be doing, or if you’ll be doing it with someone else who thinks of it as nothing while you prefer to think of it as something or vice versa. Each to their own. Personally, I’d prefer to do be doing something, but if you want to think of it as nothing that’s your call, I’m not gonna get in your way.
I’m always ready for winter until the night starts casting its shadows at 4 IN THE AFTERNOON. That’s a real low point for me and I long for gin and tonics, the smells of cut grass and sun tan lotion, barbeques and that magnificent phenomenon that is the late summer evening. I couldn’t say the same the other way round. But we couldn’t have one without the other. Except if daylight savings was sorted out to be different. The point is, all said and done the night is tremendous. But it would be nothing without the day.
