Duck Egg Blue and Other Nonsense.

I painted two casement windows in my kitchen today, changing their colour from light green to a lightish blue/grey. It’s a remarkably close match to the colour of coral contained within a picture that hangs next to it. It’s also very close to the colour of my eyes, which is a little disconcerting because the name of the colour given on the can is ‘dark duck egg.’ I’m now looking forward to the day when some strange lady (like the sort you meet in woods with wine and cats) asks me:

‘What colour eyes do you have?’ and I can answer: ‘dark duck egg.’

‘Are you related to any ducks?’ she will continue, exuding that brand of innocent charm possessed only by ladies of a certain strangeness.

‘Not as far as I know,’ I will answer honestly, but the matter won’t end there. She will look dreamily aside for a short span of time perfectly calculated to be not quite long enough to allow the making of a hurried exit, and then say:

‘I met a gentleman in Australia once who told me that I had some sort of bandicoot in my ancestry. (I suppose he'd noticed that my eyes were brown.) I didn’t like to ask him what a bandicoot was because he said he was ashamed. I can’t for the life of me imagine what he had to be ashamed of. He had such a lovely suntan and a very deep voice which made me quite giddy for a moment.’

‘Are you sure he said ‘ashamed’? Might he have said he was a shaman?’

‘Oh dearie, dearie me. What a silly cuckoo I am. Perhaps that was it. What’s a shaman?’

But before I can attempt an explanation she will change into a wombat with unusually long ears, and then disappear in a cloud of duck egg blue smoke. I will go home to tea, trying unsuccessfully to convince myself that reality is really a lot simpler than I think it is.

*  *  *

I visited Rosie again today. She came walking purposefully towards me with a distinct ‘where’s my carrot?’ look on her face. Horses are good at that, so Rosie got her carrot. And then I made friends with some young cows in a field where I’ve never seen cows before. Two of them allowed me to scratch their ears, for which honour I was exceedingly grateful.