Orange is a Secondary colour – Nicky Greer-Collins

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

Orange is a secondary colour. It combines the primary colours of red and of yellow. Depending on what base note colour you choose – red? Yellow? – and how much of its complementary top note you add – yellow? Red? – orange can be a completely different colour.

But it will still be orange.

If you go to a hardware store, or a paint shop you will find a plethora of oranges. Burnt, light, dark. Oranges with pinky-yellow hues; blood red tones. Oranges that may, in fact be peaches or clementines or tangerines.

But they’re all oranges. They all started life as red and yellow mixed together. A dab of yellow, a dollop of red.

Orange can be found in the beauty of a sunset or in the heat of a flame. It might be the giver of life and warmth and safety. It might be the harbinger of death and devastation and loss. Orange is the colour of getting ready to stop and the colour of speeding up to make it through. Orange is the colour of the amber that suspends life in stasis for centuries. Orange is the colour of my son’s hair, which I breathe in deeply when I hold him to my breast and which is home to me.

Orange is bright and warm. It is the colour of citrus-fresh, and the umber of age like the softly-falling Autumn leaves. It is diverse, yet singular. It is composed of other colours, yet rhymes with nothing.

Orange is a secondary colour, but orange is so much more.

I do not need this sushi

By Nicky Greer-Collins 23/02/19

The Japanese have a saying, which roughly translated means ‘It’s moments like these you need sushi’.

I have never needed sushi. Not once in my life.

I don’t dig seaweed, I like my rice fluffy-not-sticky and I hate ‘fishiness’. Nevertheless, I completely relate to this odd little mantra; this quirk of Japanois. I relate to this saying because this saying doesn’t relate to sushi at all. What this saying, this ‘it’s moments like these you need sushi’ really relates to is putting something in your mouth in order to shut down a conversation. To cut off a question; to conquer curiosity.

If chatter veers too wildly into the unknown, or if the pleasant hum of polite conversation is derailed by substance or uncomfortable questions; then curtly nodding and quickly adding ‘it’s moments like these you need sushi’ is really code for ‘we’ll talk about this later’.

And about that, I know plenty.

For as long as I can remember I have been the curious type. I question, I prod, I poke. I need a box – I could fill ten boxes – with the sum of my curiosity. At any given moment; about any given thing, so many  curiosities or questions can pop into my head that I need a container to catch them.

I don’t have a box, or ten. I don’t have a container. But I do have notebooks. Lots of them. I have stacked them on shelves in my living room. I have crammed them in closets, I have piled upon pile upon pile. Some are so ancient, they have been tied together with string lest they fall apart at the very seams. Others are neat as a pin or new as the day they were purchased. Whatever the case, whatever their condition they all contain the questions and thoughts that spill out of my brain and onto the page where they remain, caught in a moment or stuck in a second when my curiosity just would not quit.

The notebooks have been my safety. My security. I carry them with me for months and years until their pages are full and I pile them upon my piles, and begin again from the beginning.

That is why it was a difficult decision for me to gather up my piles upon piles, pack them into my car and drive down to the beach on this clear and crisp morning to burn them all. Just woke up, looked at the notebooks looking at me, and decided to let them go with the flames, turn to ashes and float away on the wind like so much dust.

Of course what I failed to anticipate, of course what I had forgotten, was how much of *me* was wrapped within those pages. How much of my lifetime I had invested into scribbling and scribing my thoughts; my curiosities between the covers of those cherished tomes.

And so I find myself standing on this beach in front of this pile of notebooks, box of matches in hand but frozen in the act. I am stuck between can and cannot; of ‘let go’ and ‘cling desperately to’.

It feels like a good morning for everyone but me, as I struggle with myself.

And then at long last, I strike a match.

I do not need this sushi.

And I am free.

Go Back