A week of many hues, this one. Yesterday was a full-on late autumn day in Londres. The cloud base descended to a height of about seventy feet, and the air below that was absolutely chockablock with moisture. I'm not sure that it actually rained in a strict meteorological sense, but you couldn't walk the length of a dining table without getting sodden. The air was saturated.
I went for a wander anyhoo, my usual route down to Westferry Circus. It was wonderfully desolate down there. The office fodder were put off by the weather and it was deserted. There's a lovely le Carré feel to the place when it's grey and empty like this. I can fill my time simply to staring out to the river, pretending I'm awaiting a contact from "our man in the Soviet trade delegation" or something. This kind of glassy-eyed time wasting gets me down usually, but not at especially grimy moments. I did try to read at one point, to take the curse off my idleness, by the book starting taking on board water like shit dingy, so I gave up.
Today, on the other hand, is a sunny, warm and life-affirming November day. The colours are superb, and I say this as a registered colour-blind person. It's the contrast between the plant life and the sky that does the trick. Decaying organic greens and browns seem to suit that cornflower blue you get in the sky in the late afternoons at this time of year. I was always taught that "blue and green should never be seen", but this is the exception. Everyone from Keats to Jeremy Clarkson seems to like the combo.
Actually, why on earth did they try and teach us an orthodoxy of the aesthetics of colour using rhyme in the 70s, like this? It's seemed as natural as learning the times tables at the time. Now it strikes me as a lot bizarre and a little sinister. I dare say Thatcher heaved that bit of the syllabus out the window as soon as soon as her skinny white ass hit the Parker Knoll in Number 10 in 1979. Had she stopped there, I might have felt better disposed towards the dozy old sow.
Or perhaps not.
