It’s Been A Very Blue Week

… in a good way

Blue. I see it everywhere now, like when you buy a green car and suddenly you notice so many green cars.

The glint of a sapphire engagement ring. A woman in an azure dress. A cobalt blue ribbon. A powder blue car. And of course, my new Bay Area Blue dining room. Even when I am out of my house, away from it, I dream of returning and just inhabiting the blue of the room, liquifying into its walls. This is a deep love.

Can you love a colour? Maggie Nelson asked in Bluets.

“Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?”

I wrote about my week of procrastination here:

But when I look back now, I wasn’t procrastinating so much as trying to create more hours in the day — getting up at 5am to paint, writing in between and then painting until midnight. I feel that more urgently now in my late forties, without sounding morbid, I want to squeeze more hours in, to get up earlier, to do more. I think of all the real procrastinating I did twenty years ago, nights out in London and the whole weekend on the sofa to recover with actual physical boxsets, getting up only to change the DVD. Why wasn’t I doing more then? Reading more, writing more, travelling more, visiting art galleries more…

But time was for wasting then. Now, it is for paying attention, for using more constructively. I know I feel like this due to perimenopause, that my obsession with death (I mean, to be fair I did spend months writing a book about death with Wendy Mitchell) made me feel the need to live more. That’s what Wendy’s message was, that to talk about death makes us want to live.

I met another man this week who has just been diagnosed with dementia. He is a man who is in the public eye and we met to talk about his potential book. His diagnosis, like Wendy’s, has brought life into sharper focus. I don’t think that’s ever a bad thing.

But back to blue…

“We love to contemplate blue,” Goethe observed in his theory of color and emotion, “not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.”

In Bluets, Maggie Nelson also wrote this:

“But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature — mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries) — that cautionary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.”

I’ve written before about Rebecca Solnit’s description of ‘the blue of longing’ in her Field Guide To Getting Lost, how much time do we waste waiting for things, of seeing that blue of longing between us and our dream instead of just getting on and realising it? Yesterday I listened to

sam baker

’s interview with Miranda July in which Sam asked her what advice she would give to younger women, it was (to paraphrase) to get on with the business of living, to find a way to get closer to your dream, however close looks to you. Don’t wait.

I didn’t wait to paint my room once the idea struck. Here’s how it turned out:

Excuse the ladder still in view, I’m still piecing the room back together.

And another blue thing that happened this week, while up that same ladder, paintbrush in hand, I heard the soft thud of finished copies of a new book of mine landing on my doormat. This book is by Nusrit Mehtab who was at one time the most senior Asian woman in the Met Police. Her story is one of racism and misogyny, and her memoir interweaves her own experience with the state of the Met Police now according to Baroness Casey’s review which was published last year.

I love ghosting strong female voices, and Nusrit’s book is already being acclaimed by her peers.

You see, more blue.

And today, I see the flash of blue in the British Airways logo as I’m writing this from the M25 in the back of a taxi as I travel to Heathrow to catch a flight to New York. Not a bad way to wake up on a Sunday morning.

I shall write to you from New York where I am hoping to give you a little literary tour of the place — don’t hold me to it though, I have an eleven year old in tow who is planning to camp in Sephora for the week.

But then time — and apparently money — is for the young to waste…