The colours of spring!

The Daffodils are out today and their cheerful yellow colour really makes you feel better. Yellow is, of course, the colour of spring and so many of the early plants and flowers seem to have yellow as their dominant tone – crocus, daffs, forsythia, gorse – all early flowering and all yellow. And it's no coincidence that the sun - that great giver of life on earth -  is yellow!

Colour plays a very important part in our lives and moods and it must be dreadful not to be able to see it. Not to be able to appreciate the glorious dark red of a long stemmed rose, the frothy pink or white of the cherry trees in full bloom, the startling blue of a kingfisher or the bright green of a well watered garden lawn (not that we will be doing any lawn watering this summer if the water companies have anything to do with it – drought indeed!) removes one of the great joys of life and some of the beautiful world we live in. Many people say they could not live without the seasons we get in the UK, because they love the variety of appearance in the natural landscape and the changes in the weather. They feel that wall to wall sunshine must be boring, and whilst I don’t agree with that, I can see what they mean.

Working in the city seems very drab compared to living in the country, because all you see is tones of grey. Yes, there are street trees and parks and Holland Park in spring and summer is gorgeous, but you have to seek them out and there is not a lot of colour in the general city landscape. Living out in the sticks (and even though it is probably the outer reaches of suburbia, I do class where I live as the sticks) colour is on your doorstep all the time. I can look out of my bedroom window and see green trees, fields, blossom, pretty blue tits and robins and colourful crops. I don’t have to go out and look for it, it’s just there.

There are people that make a living out of telling you what colours to use in your house. These ‘colour consultants’ have made a fortune out of telling you the bleedin’ obvious; they will tell you that in your house, colours to lift your mood are bright and spring like or maybe redolent of the Mediterranean, whilst colours to create a serious atmosphere are more sombre and usually darker, colours to stimulate are bright and fierce, colours to calm you are muted and pastel. There’s probably a qualification in colour analysis that you can do from some psycho babble university somewhere I should probably enrol for in preparation for the inevitable redundancy in a few years time, and then I could go out and sell my ‘expertise’ to the vulnerable and gullible.

Colour consultants who tell you how to dress are possibly more useful, in that they have to assess individual skin tones and hair colours and make recommendations accordingly. About nine months ago I went blonde; I have two or three items of clothing which looked great with my burnished chestnut hair but now make me look like I died several weeks ago. One of them, which I am particularly fond of, is an acid yellow shirt which I loved to wear in summer with jeans and which will now, if I stick with the blonde, have to be consigned to dusters. And I think I will stick with the blonde, since it has been universally complimented and I have been treated in a noticeably nicer way by every single man I meet. Yes girls, they do treat blondes differently! Again, in physical appearance, colour is important (and no, that’s not a racist comment, just a statement of fact).

For now, I am going to enjoy the bright colours of spring because they make me feel happier and I know that summer is on its way.  I will enjoy the burnished copper and gold of autumn even though I dislike being cold and wet, and much as I hate it I must admit that the sparking white snow and frost of winter is beautiful to look at.

And I must go shopping to get some summer clothes more suited to my new hair colour. Any excuse!