Two things I noticed about colour today

Yes. Out in the lanes and bridleways, with black mud spattered in my face and all down the outside of my leg where I overbalanced in a splodgy rut where the wheels couldn't get any purchase. Demanding but fun - and healthful.

Two things about colour, then.

1. In the sunlit, bright green and dark-shadowed late summer foliage, where purple-black elderberries are hanging overheavy, and the blackberries are ripening through red into black, the wood pigeons' plumage looks blue rather than grey - the blue grey of a nighttime cigarette-smoky jazz bar lit by Ridley Scott.


2. Where the road bends and then passes over a culvert, there's a bridge set into the flat field. The railings of the bridge are painted - where the paint hasn't peeled or been superseded by rust - a flat, pale blue: that washed-out, aquatic blue, the colour of every outdoor paddling/swimming pool we put our feet in when we were kids. The blue that has in it the memory of high, strong sunlight, of flies in the water, and thirst that can only be slaked by Ribena.

I ate some blackberries from roadside bushes, and rode along a byway I'd never used before, finding myself on a raised bank in the middle of two stripped fields with the wind blowing stalk fragments about, and tiny weeds in the spaces vacated by the crops.