I woke with the feeling I should be back in the land of nod, today. My eyelids kept drooping and I was terse and short-tempered.
Phil assessed the situation with admirable speed and accuracy and informed the children they were coming out to see The Voyage of The Dawn Treader at the cinema. And Mummy was staying at home.
I fell into bed after cooking chicken pie for dinner. I slept through my childrens’ departure and woke at 3:30 as the gloom of the English evening was already beginning to fall.
But I felt great. That extra sleep had set me up, and suddenly a grim dark world looked almost friendly. I slipped the dog onto his lead and headed out for an extended walk in the forest.
My new-found optimism was unshakeable, but the waning light was doing its best to dissuade me that life was looking up. There should, shouldn’t there, be something to recommend my beautiful forest, even on a day like this?
The weather men had advised us it would be clear, sharp, cold sun today. But the layer of cloud blanketed everything as I squelched through the mud.
It was good to be out, though.
Until I reached a favourite spot. I had taken a picture there in the balmy days of summer, with light dappling the forest floor and sun permeating every corner. It was the quintessence of the most golden warmth. Merchant Ivory stuff.
The contrast with the dearth of light today was almost too much. The light was grudging, like an old tramp in a battered thrift-shop suit who will not hand over the bottle for a comradely swig.
And then it hit me: it would not take so much to give this scene a makeover.
Just a sprinkling of pristine snow.
Because white transforms the landscape. And it does something I have never fully appreciated before: it reflects the light back out at us, doubling the amount in the proverbial bottle.
White is a valuable commodity.
And this goes for our household, too. Things enter it white, but rarely leave in the same condition. There should be a banner over the threshold warning all textiles, furnishings and white goods: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
Their journey through the underworld might entail a dark voyage through the laundry cycle; a spell living side by side with that most dishevelling of dogs, Macaulay; a battering from a well meaning but bumptious Shrewsday child.
Our fine fridge is a prime example. A tall imposing monolith next to the back door, it was once crafted in the whitest of metal and trimmed in pristine plastic. It gleamed and gave off the rays only the most hygenic of appliances can reflect. It was white in the truest sense of the word.
But years next to the back door have accorded it thumbprints belonging to those ranging from three years old to ten; the wear and tear of a dog who hares past, and eats adjacently; welly splatters; I could continue, but it would not be meet. Suffice to say that the fridge is a long-suffering applicance which wishes it had been bought by the spotless family just down the road.
There are, however, a few devices which remain moderately white. They are our gadgets: the technological right-hand-microchips which are very near the centre of our orbit. Namely: my trusty laptop, and my equally faithful iPhone.
The laptop is a Mac, an all-white princess of a machine, a birthday present which has rarely been turned off since its arrival last April. Before that, I had a black one with a huge screen: right up until the moment Maddie accidentally spilt a large mug of nearby tea all over the keyboard.
It was nothing to this beauty, though, which is built not for programmers and number crunchers, but for artists and sub editors and photographers.
Phil and I learnt our journalistic craft on tiny stacking Macs at journalism college some 20 years ago, and have never lost our love of the Apple.
My little phone looks like the Mac’s MiniMe. It is clothed in a white case redolent of old science fiction like Logan’s Run and Space 1999. One look at it and you can hear the hover cars outside and the soft swish of doors as they open for people in knee length white boots and space attire to sashay into the room.
It is a particular white, this space-white. Not quite gleaming white, if you understand: white with a hint of cream.
Princess Leia white. Storm-trooper-white.
Phil calls the two gadgets my storm troopers. The reference cannonballs me back to that wonderful moment in that first Star Wars movie, back in the days when I was trying to decide whether I was a Luke Skywalker girl or a Han Solo woman: and then a storm trooper, dressed in that fetching white plastic number, bangs his head on the ceiling as he comes along the corridor.
It put the whole teenage angst business into perspective, really.
And Princess Leia’s frock.
Oh, the white swathes of material; the regal folds combined with the seventies knowing cut of the cloth; the purity and the steeliness of this princess, all wrapped up in the whitest of white dresses.
Lucas uses white and black in a blatant piece of colour coding. Black is bad, white is good. It makes for easily understood allegory.
It is interesting that a civilisation where the sun is relentless used a very different symbolism.
The Ancient Egyptians lived in a shade-starved land, where the light-drenched desert stretches remorselessly out, devouring and dessicating so many of the living things in its path.
But the Nile and its floods brought a dark, nutrient-rich soil to Egypt, providing all that the ancient civilisation needed to live abundantly.
To them, black represented life: and white, death.
But here I sit, in a darkened country, with the muted whites of my household, waiting for the white outside, in whatever form, to return.
A nice layer of snow should do the trick.
Kate Shrewsday 
I think of it as “thick white” it has depth, soul and feelings.
Green will also brighten up your spot, keep breathing, spring will evenyually come back.
😀 Thank you, Sidey: I sincerely hope so…
One of my favorite stones is the opal. White yet glowing with rainbows at the same time. With an opal it really does matter “how you looks at things”
Brilliant thought, Carl. I have never thought of an opal in that light before.
The interesting thing about white, Kate, is that without it Watercolour would not work at all.
Water colour relies on the white of the base paper showing through the filter of the paint so as to give it its true colour in the painting.
As you say, we cannot do without white!
Love Dad
I love the fact that white is the sum of all colours, Dad. That when you split them up using a prism you can see the light’s different elements. Somehow that seems connected to the watercolour process, but I’m not sure how….
I felt similar feelings looking out our windows. The rain and warm temperatures washed away all the snow in one fell swoop, leaving green grass, which was strange on the first of January, and mud. The deer are now well camouflaged, which is good for them, but, my what a mess they have made. I love this line of yours in particular, Kate: “The contrast with the dearth of light today was almost too much. The light was grudging, like an old tramp in a battered thrift-shop suit who will not hand over the bottle for a comradely swig. ” ha! What an image that is of early, early morn.
Ah, well, light is forming on my day, so, off I go . . .
We have had a few flakes of snow this morning, but nothing that would brighten up the landscape yet …. good luck with the old tramp, Penny 🙂 Have a lovely day.
I think I am done with white for now. I know in the weeks before the holidays, I longed for snow, but now that we have it and it has stuck around for more than half a day, I think it can return from whence it came. Snow has overstayed its welcome. Now I am longing for some green.
May the snowdrops find their way into that rather beautiful back yard of yours with all speed, Kristine 🙂
Hi Kate
As you know, we are gradually becoming complete converts to all things Apple at our house. I’ve got my eye on one of the new Mac Book Airs at the moment …
Re Star Wars, can’t resist mentioning a trip to the cinema to see Episode 1 after a party the night before. I think that at least some of the people there found the cinema seats to be so comfortable that they slept through most of the film!!
No, I just felt so ill that the spaceships veering from one side of the screen to the other made me feel distinctly queasy….best to shut your eyes and ignore the galaxy in those circumstances 😀 Enjoy that MacBook Air when it arrives….
The ink is black. The page is white. Your posts makes effective use of both. 😉
Like Penny, I loved your begrudging tramp.
😀 Thanks Nancy. Cheers….
The light reflecting effect of the snow is so wonderful at this time of the year when the dawn and dusk are pushed too close together and a grey blanket covers the sky.
We had a smattering of the white stuff tonight…. I hope some of it reaches you.
Me too. I could use a weather event…back to work tomorrow. Hope all goes well with you and that correspondence which ambushed your new year.
Apropos of nothing:
“There’s times when you’ll think that you mightn’t,
There’s times when you know that you might;
But the things you will learn from the Yellow and Brown,
They’ll ‘elp you a lot with the White!” – Kipling.
Hope you get some white soon, Kate.
Ha! Never heard that on before! Time to go and read some more Kipling….it’ll get darker before it gets lighter, with this partial eclipse today. Have a good day, Cindy 🙂
You probably already know, but the mornings carry on getting later for a while, while the evenings start to draw out here in UK… so that make it even harder for folk like me to get out of bed in the mornings. Its nearly 8:15 here and the sky has a slant of brightness in the East: an orangey yellow light under a ledge of heavy cloud, which is lifting the murky light..
Its now 3pm, and the light here has remained stubbornly grudging today, Pseu. How about you?
Maybe we will get more light tomorrow 🙂
We had bright sunshine for a while in the middlish part of the day. Fantastically lifting.
Then this pm as dusk was well and truly descending as I returned to the office from my last visit, a huge flock of starlings danced in the air for me, splitting and reforming, pulsing and fluctuating, and no-one else in the world seemed to be noticing. I parked the car and got out. They were so low over me for while that I could hear the rush of their wings like a soft brush. It was thrilling.
After tying up a few ends in the office I came out to find the row of conifers behind where I had parked the car absolutely full of birds bedtime chatter and the sky empty. They had gone home to roost, but no-one had told them yet to ‘settle down now and go to sleep.’
How beautiful: what an uplifting day. I feel cheerful just reading about it 🙂
I’m pleased.