Layers

Layers of colour - or, if you prefer, shades of grey - from my window; layers of thought when you look at my extra photo. A meeting which lasted well into lunchtime meant that I hadn't shopped since Hogmanay, and I was running out of fresh veg. I took the main photo as I was collecting my jacket - a strangely yellow grey lay over the town (foreground) while the sky slightly to the north was a slate grey, shading into dark blue round the snowy mountains in the distance. It looked slightly uncomfortable, threatening, alien ...

And then I went to Morrison's, and took the second photo after I'd loaded the car. It struck me that supermarkets (other than the truly tiny) and schools (ditto) have in common the ability to make you forget your surroundings, the rain and the dark outside. When I returned to work after eight years of child-rearing, it struck me how I could be back in the city when it came to my daily existence, and later, when we painted the English department predominantly yellow, its cheerful cosiness nullified the existence of the rain-swept hills and the dark forests that we could see from the upper corridor, to say nothing of the grey sea that cut us off from the past.

Sometimes the gloom is overpowering; no wonder we light the equivalent of our ancestors' fires and cower in our caves till the sun returns ...