Or Colours for the Season
Every year it’s the same thing.
Spring has sprung, flowers flowered, buds budded and the new season is tugging on the curtain cord to usher in the cast for summer – t-shirts, shorts and general getting out of doors again.
It’s about the time I reawaken too, eager to get out of the studio, feeling optimistic about life in general, full of vim and vigour and all those happy ingredients you need to get a good hold on spring.
That’s when it all starts.
I will run into an acquaintance and they will invariably say “Oh you’re so pale!”
Or maybe “Have you been sick lately, you look overly wan!”
When it’s not “Goodness, have you lost weight? You don’t look good at all.”
Little by little, my vim dims and the spring goes out of my spring. From vigorous to valetudinarian, I vacillate and slink back to the dim sanctuary of my studio, a pallid bust of my former (and inner) self.
So much for summer.
But this year, no more Mr. Nice Guy. I am taking action.
I have explored my options:
1. Do not leave house or answer the doorbell until fall. (This may not be a viable option.)
2. Invest in a wide-brimmed hat, Venetian carnaval mask or paper bag with holes for the eyes. (I still have the bag from last year.)
3. Immediately slap my interlocutor resoundingly on both cheeks and exclaim “Oh but you have a nice rosy flushed complexion!” (But will they let me keep my paper bag on in court?)
4. Purchase a tanning light. (I’d have to go out of the house or answer the doorbell.)
5. All of the above, in any order.
All things considered, I may just have to tough it out. Besides, one of these years, pale is bound to be in fashion.
HEAVY RAINS
A stone’s throw from downtown Neuchâtel, this is the river that used to actually run through the centre of the old town, now replaced by a street of the same name (and graced with a ridiiculous little trickle of water in a sort of deep gutter in which inattentive drivers occasionally get stuck). It must have been incredibly picturesque. In heavy rain it becomes a torrent, so I occasionally nip out, get scrupulously soaked (a REAL Vancouverite isn’t happy unless he has rain dripping off his ear lobes and the tip of his nose – must be that doughty British heritage, what?) and take a few pictures.
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Left: Gor du Vauseyon, the main waterfall.
Right: From a little farther down. Only someone as audacious as nature, who is notorious for paying scant attention to convention, would set trees up in a composition like that.
