14th day

Went for a wet walk in Cambridge at lunchtime, around the block, looking at all the grey rainy houses, such close neighbours, feeling happy that I have so much space around my house, so many tall trees, so lucky to have room to breathe, so fortuitous to be friends with a meadow.

Blue paint is beautiful on a grey day.  Bright turquoise, deep ultramarine, cobalt, azure, indigo, cerulean, even the words conjuring up so many images: earth from space, the little blue marble of our planet,  the Caribbean sea, the stormy Atlantic, my childrens' eyes, my old school song, stage curtains, nightfall.  

The majority of people in the world choose blue as their favourite colour.  I wonder if that's the pervasiveness of the sky and its reflection in our eyes.

So we all love that blue depth.  But apparently we see red differently, men and women.  The ability to see red is contained in a gene which sits on the X chromosome, and women have two of those, therefore two copies of the gene, so we see many more variations of red than do men. 

So today here is a myriad of blue fragments of 8th grade Gerhard Richter-inspired abstract art. 

And then there is the damp smell of the road when you're travelling on a rain-drenched journey home from school in the pouring night, your nose aware of an acute mixture of asphalt and grass, car exhausts and splashing puddles, until finally by heart you know the sharp turn of the driveway, the dripping trees lining your path up the hill to the house with its bright windows shining, and inside your people waiting, and hot supper.