Black is the Colour.

I’ve lived in the Shire for more than fifteen years now, and yet today I encountered a woman I’ve never seen before. She was rather attractive, too, probably around forty and possessed of dark hair and a youthful figure. I said ‘good morning’ (even though it was actually afternoon) and she said ‘hi’ before smiling at me rather nicely. (She couldn’t have been much over forty because women over forty, especially those who live in posh houses, generally don’t say ‘hi’. They say ‘hello’ or ‘good afternoon’ or ‘how do you do’ if a reasonable probability of social intercourse appears to be in the offing.) The point is, though, that it seems such a long time since an attractive, dark haired woman said ‘hi’ to me and smiled nicely. Attractive, dark haired women hardly ever speak to me these days, or even acknowledge my presence.

And do you know what this mysterious woman was wearing? All black. And do you know what she was doing? Standing in her garden painting her gate – black. (Which seems rather unusual to a person of my generation. When I was growing up, men generally had sole rights to the paint brushes, while the women prepared dinner and told the children that they mustn’t go anywhere near daddy because they might get black paint on their nice clean clothes and mummy wouldn’t be best pleased at having to get it off again.)

So then I moved onward and upward to the village proper, where I further encountered another woman standing in her garden. No mystery there, though; I’ve had plenty of conversations with her over the years. She’s the one I’ve mentioned before, the one with the big yellow Labrador dog whose desire to befriend me was discouraged on the grounds that it might leap in my direction and pull her over. And there was a Labrador dog standing next to her, only it wasn’t yellow. It was black, which caused me to wonder whether the mystery woman had made the journey onward and upward earlier in order to practice her painting skills on the dog. I didn’t ask.