Asbestos in 1920

A friend lent me his volume 10 of The Children's Encyclopedia edited by Arthur Mee. Judging from its blue cover colour it is a 1920 edition. Typical of its era it suggests that man will soon have more or else everything under control. And in it I found this amazing page on the various uses for asbestos now known to be "the biggest occupational health killer of our time", purporting its use in clothing, carpets, upholstery, furniture...

...Being fireproof, is is very valuable, and its use is constantly being extended in many directions.

Beautiful Ireland 2

Beautiful Ireland from Church Mountain

Last Sunday I was returning the long way from a swim in the river and happened upon three mountain-cyclists about to head over the pass between Corriebracks and Church Mountain. On their encouragement I followed their route this afternoon, parking my bike on the way down to walk (barefoot of course) to the summit of Church Mountain. The last time I climbed this mountain was many years ago - I think in the snow with my younger daughter who was so small the snow kept coming over her boots so I had to carry her.  

I strongly recommend this route to anyone who enjoys the outside. We live somewhere close to those lakes you see in the panorama above. Like I said before - Wow! We are so blessed to have places like this within walking or cycling distance! 

My new road bike has aluminium rims and I thought might not like the stones and ruts, so I used my trusty "mountain" bike (aka my old road bike promoted).

Courtesy Google Maps: Yellow = cycling, Red = walking
(Click on image to display large version)

So here are some more pictures from the trip:

You can see the track over the hills and far away

Looking back, and the typical track surface

Half-way up - looking towards Hollywood

My trusty mountain bike and one of the many gates to negotiate

The pass summit - looking south

The pass summit - looking west towards Church Mountain

Here I left my steed and climbed on foot - literally

View from the summit of Church Mountain

The cairn enclosing the remains of a church

In memory of someone or other who also loved these hills

Last glance back at the summit

The descent towards Donard

On the way home through Hollywood Glen

Stilettos and lipstick

On the whole I am happy with my lot of being a male. Perhaps men will never fully understand some areas of the female mind, for all their niceness. Stiletto heels and lipstick are two such areas. I fail to see why anyone would want to wear either. Before I go any further I had better make clear that I am not in any way saying women should not suffer discomfort in wearing shoes with ridiculously high heels, or plaster bright red waxy stuff on their lips, if that is really what they want to do and as long as they do not imagine that they are doing it to please me. Because it doesn't. I don't think it looks sexy. I don't even think it looks nice. There we are, I've said it. Oh - but I can get annoyed when I find a red waxy smear on the cup I am about to drink out of - ugh! Not to mention what damage a stiletto heel can do to flooring or, worse still, as a murder weapon. It's not that I am against make-up (although I wouldn't want to wear it myself) - provided it is not OTT.

Wikipedia has this to say on the subject: "Stilettos, like all similar high-heeled shoes, give the optical illusion of a longer, slimmer leg, a smaller foot, and overall greater height. They alter the wearer's

posture and gait, flexing the calf muscles and making the bust and buttocks more prominent." So there you have it - they make your legs, bust and buttocks look bigger.

As to what they do for your health, Wikipedia goes on to say: "All high heels counter the natural functionality of the foot, which can create skeletal and muscular problems if users wear them excessively; such shoes are a common cause of venous complaints such as pain, fatigue, and heavy-feeling legs, and have been found to provoke venous hypertension in the lower limbs.Despite their impracticality, their popularity remains undiminished..."

Personally I prefer going around barefoot.

And here are some particularly extreme (and IMHO rather silly) examples.

Song of Albion 4

I have a lot of stuff I could talk about on the subject of music and perhaps I will in future posts, but for now I guess I want to express some of my gut-feelings rather than just quote interesting facts.

A while ago I wrote about wonder and the sort of music I enjoy most has this element. Andrew Marr writes about music and mystery and the ineffability of music. There are not too many things that are "too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words" so when one finds one it would seem to me to be especially worthy of attention. I suppose it is this quality above all that has attracted me to Bruckner and the same sentiment is in the quote "It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it" from my last post.

A necessary ingredient in ineffability is the element of surprise. Like when you make it to the top of a hill and a glorious panorama lays before you. Or when “Great globes (gourds) of yellow fruit hung from the trees—clustered as toy-balloons … He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger… But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed more pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men… For one draught of this on earth wars would have been fought and nations betrayed.” (Perelandra, Lewis).

Surprise, in turn, implies variety. I look forward to and greatly enjoy eating good old British fish'n'chips or iced doughnuts but can you imagine having them for every meal?

And variety is sadly missing in so much popular music now-a-days. Art (music is art) should explore the whole gamut of expression available to it. Pictures might use vivid colours or pastels, flat or exaggerated perspective, soft or hard lines - but not always the same, please.  Marr says "Complicated mechanical structures in music, in themselves, offer little sense of mystery and some of the simplest folk melodies sound as if they were whispered at the dawn of creation." Scarborough Fair being one such melody.

So - what makes some music ineffable whilst other is a monotony of noise? That is what I want to explore in future posts

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Siderodromomania

siderodromomania - n. - a passion for railroads, trains - from Greek sideros 'iron' + dromos 'running'.

Apparently that's what I suffer from - according to the E&T. Only mildly, mind you: I knew someone in Sutton who had it bad - it was almost impossible to have a conversation with him without a mention of something to do with railways.

Song of Albion 3

Historically the concept of musica universalis described the way in which the heavenly bodies were thought to relate harmoniously - the "music of the spheres". Likewise the terms musica divina "music of the gods" and musica humana - of the human body suggest that order exists in all these areas. That the music we listen to is somehow based on, indeed caused by this intrinsic "music". I have already mentioned how this idea is suggested in the Bible, is the theme in the Song of Albion trilogy and the creation of Narnia.

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. (The Magician's Nephew, Lewis).

So - what is music and why or how is it important to us?

In effect it might be "Vocal and/or instrumental sounds combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony and expression of emotion". Mechanically it is true that the pitch and timing of the sounds that make up music are related by whole-number ratios, indeed these ratios are almost synonymous with the term "harmony".

Many people say they listen to music for its emotional effects but I think it can go deeper than that.

Michael Card has noted that "Socrates once said, "when the soul hears music, it drops its best guard." That, for me, is one of the best descriptions of the power that music has. With music it is 
possible to open a door in the heart of the listener... It has the power to transport us, can rob us of ability to listen to the lyrics... Therefore, we must pass on to our children a biblical value system which is shaped by an awareness of the power and true purpose of music. We must listen along with them."

Some would say that the primary purpose of music, or when music does its best, is in worship of God. 

Considered a simpleton by his contemporaries, the composer Bruckner showed remarkable boldness when he said "They want me to write differently. Certainly I could do, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?" 

Music is a major part in the activities of most Christians (and those of other religions) - in our church meetings we typically start with half an hour of "praise and worship" followed by the "word" or preaching. Why would we want to spend all that time messing with music if it were not a vehicle for our convictions?

And yet not all music has the same effect. Music can be constructive or destructive, can lift our spirit or push us down, can evoke peace or incite trouble. What makes the difference? Do a web search and you will come up with all manner of conspiracy type theories about back beat, rock music, backmasking, but my quest was to find what works or doesn't work for me. I am not at all sure that I have found my quest but I found some interesting stuff along the way...

next post Song of Albion 2

previous post Song of Albion 4

Beautiful Ireland

Is this paradise? Or perhaps Nutwood? No, it is beautiful County Wicklow in early morning sun, and I snapped it this morning just a couple of miles from where I live. Not only that - there are mountains, lakes, forests and swimmable rivers all within walking and cycling distance. Wow! And for those of different inclination there are even shops within running distance though why anyone would want to shop with all those other options beats me.  So here are a few more pics from this morning's ambulation (barefoot of course).

Rhaetian Railway

I grew up loving railways. My father's railway room and going to school on what is now the Watercress Line might have had something to do with it. I could have been a train driver, or maybe the surveyor who decides the optimal route as a track traverses mountains - or involved in signalling. Witness the episode in which I incised cuttings in my parent's lawn for my Lone Star track, or the complex signalling system I created in the railway room, or imaging myself a train whilst running around the playing fields during the lunch hour at school. One of my main doodle types when I am bored in meetings is to create railway systems. You can see that I am kind of soft in the head about railways.

Die cast Lone Star track and rolling stock

This locomotive I christened "Bournemouth"

and this one "Swanage"

Along with bricks of various kinds and Meccano (I still have and cherish my father's Mecanno set) these Lone Star models were amongst my favourite toys. I do not know why I named one locomotive "Bournemouth" and another "Swanage" but to this day if I hear of or read either place-name I am immediately presented with a mental image of the corresponding Lone Star avatar.

But I digress. What caught my eye today was this travel feature about the Rhaetian Railway. Wow - this is a railway and a half and how I would love to have the money and time to waste to navigate the whole length of it. Google Street View have imaged some of the track - possibly the first and only "Railway View"!

The track gauge is 3 ft 3³⁄₈ in  as opposed to standard gauge of 4 ft 8¹⁄₂ in.

Here's a short video I found...

Class inversion

In the UK one's class is determined predominantly by birthright. As my father owned a small building business wikipedia reckons my class is "ONS group 4".

ONS class structure in UK

On trying out the BBC class calculator it reckoned that my class is "Emergent service workers - a new, young, urban group which is relatively poor but has high social and cultural capital" which, I must confess, was a bit of a surprise to me.

My wife, who considers her background to be "upper middle class" (her father was a solicitor and she went to Cheltenham Ladies College), claims that I am, at best, only "lower middle class"...

I am reasonably educated, I attended a grammar school and then Oriel college, Oxford where I obtained a first class honours degree in Natural Sciences (Physics). I worked at the elitist BBC Research Department where I qualified as "Research Engineer". I am a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology and am entitled to place "CEng" after my name. For what it is worth I am also a "Certified Water Specialist" as recognised by the WQA. Although my spelling can be a bit wobbly at times I know when to write it's as opposed to its and you're as opposed to your. I generally call the female species of humans "women" and reserve the title "lady" to those who deserve it. I will use a butter knife if one is provided and leave my knife and fork in the correct position when I have finished eating, and I try not to talk with my mouth full. Whilst the cherry stones rule possibly excludes me from All Souls, Oxford, I think I do better with them than some. And I like (some) classical music and cannot abide background music.

But I am a true engineer at heart. Whilst I run an electronics design and prototyping business for a living, when necessary I will get my hands dirty (and smelly) sorting out the drains or the sump pump in our septic tank. I do plumbing and electrical repairs and am not afraid to get involved in other building trades within reason. And I run (through mud if necessary) barefoot.

All of which leads to a curious case of Class Inversion. In the presence of people who exhibit the tell-tales, of which I have listed some above, I sometimes find myself considered as, referred to indeed, as lower class. Not directly of course - just by implication. Listen - this does not offend me, rather I consider it a privilege to be recognised amongst their ranks. Just that it makes me wonder - what am I?

Do you see too?

Here's another gripe about the 'C' programming language or at least Microchip's C18 implementation of it. Oh, and by the way, here's another programmer's take on the subject.

Here a quote from the C18 user guide:

2.7.1 Integer Promotions
ISO mandates that all arithmetic be performed at int precision or greater. By default, MPLAB C18 will perform arithmetic at the size of the largest operand, even if both operands are smaller than an int. The ISO mandated behavior can be instated via the -Oi command-line option.

When coding for an 8-bit microprocessor one tends to use 8-bit (byte) variables wherever possible as these are native to the processor.  If you are coding in C18 you are likely to be using one of the PIC18 range of processors and these, we know, have a hardware 8-bit by 8-bit multiplier giving a 16-bit result in one machine cycle.

unsigned char a, b;
unsigned short int c;
a = 100;
b = 200;
c = a * b;

How crazy is it, then, that the above code in C18 will yield 'c' = 32!  the last line will of course use the hardware multiplier and then will throw away the upper byte of the result before expanding the answer to 16-bits by adding a zero upper byte and placing it in variable 'c'.

Worse still is

#define factor 31
unsigned char a;

a = ((factor * 60) / 100);

Here the intention is to give variable 'a' the value 60% of that of constant 'factor'. The constant expression to the right of the equals sign is, of course, evaluated at compilation time so that the run-time code sees simply 'a' being set to a constant.  In assembler I am used such expressions being evaluated without loss of precision until the answer is placed into 'a' and raising a warning if it is too big. But in C18 the expression is evaluated in byte precision and yielding 'a' = 0. To stop this happening one can use:

a = ((factor * 60ul) / 100ul);

to force the evaluation to use unsigned long (32-bit) precision, but this is hardly intuitive.  I would not have so much minded had C18 deigned to raise a warning but, no, it blithely continues in its legalistic, archaic and ridiculous way...

The reason for using 'C' for embedded processors is to increase productivity and yet produce tight, efficient code. The above example shows how 'C' fails to do this as, I think, the only way to force the compiler to do the obvious is to insert assembler code.

Oldtown Naas

Today I discovered Oldtown for the first time in almost 30 years of living here - I had a few minutes to myself in Naas so went to my favourite haunt along the canal. I found a wee path and went exploring and found myself standing at a gate looking into the gardens of Oldtown House. Such beauty so close to the centre of the town!

The wee path to the gates

Oldtown gardens from the gates

I regret the only camera I had with me was a smart phone with a scratched lens, so my pictures are rather fuzzy. So I did a bit of research and found a comprehensive video:

This link gives some history from which I quote:

"In 1696 Thomas Burgh acquired a property outside Naas called Oldtown. The site lay near a holy well where St Patrick reputedly baptised Oillill and Illann, the sons of King Dunlang of Leinster. In 1709, he designed and oversaw the construction of a new house at Oldtown, one of Ireland's first Palladian winged houses. The building comprised of a two storey central block flanked by two storey wings. The centre block was adorned with pairs of Ionic pilasters, rising to just beneath the windows of the first floor. The wings were likewise adorned with Ionic pilasters, all of which carried substantial entablatures. Thomas's masterpiece was to remain the pride of his descendants until the centre block was destroyed by fire in the 1950s and the family moved into one of the wings."

North-east perimeter

Google-maps - I was at top left

Clive Drive

Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum home computer

Many years ago I started Microlite by designing an external disk drive interface for the ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum was one of the first home gaming computers in the UK. The firm I was working for had a bunch of Quick-Disk drives gathering dust so hired me to design the interface.

Quick-Disk

The Quick-Disk comprises a 2.8" floppy platter with a single spiral track rather like a record. To access data the drive traverses the whole track (48K-bytes) and this takes 8 seconds. You can turn the disk over to avail of a second 48K-bytes worth. The drive included a read/write head amplifier but no other processing.

The interface hardware was novel in that it used simple logic (TTL gates and registers) and the processing power of the Spectrum's Z80 microprocessor to decode or encode the drive data on the fly.

And then there was the necessary software. It was necessary to reverse engineer the Spectrum's operating system in order to integrate the disk drive and provide the necessary new commands to operate it.  All this was done on a 80286 desktop running MSDOS - long before Windows or the internet. My best companion during this period of sheer hard graft was Dickens' Spectrum Advanced User Guide.

My best companion

Thus I wrote a disk operating system or DOS. Others have made millions by so doing - I can't remember what I charged but it certainly did not make me rich, but it did kick-start my business and so I am eternally grateful to Clive, and to John my client, for the opportunity they gave me.

The final Clive Drive was technically a success.  A mere 8 seconds to load a game was much better than many minutes with a cassette recorder and the interface supported hacking via the "Keymaster" button. But regrettably the product was not well advertised and was launched towards the end of the Spectrum's lifetime, so I doubt if my client ever recouped his costs.

Surprisingly the world still remembers the Clive Drive - so it wasn't all a dream after all!  I found this picture and a couple of links here and here on the internet. The red button is the "Keymaster" button.

The Clive Drive interface and disk drive

For those interested here are some photographs of circuit schematics and operating instructions which, I regret, I no longer have in digital format. Click on a picture to enlarge it.

First page of Clive Drive operating instructions

Schematic page 1

Schematic page 2 -
the disk drive connector is at the bottom
with RDDT being the raw serial data
from the read head, and WRDT the
serial data to the write head.

"Peek-Poker" used the Keymaster button
to freeze a game and offer various
debugging / hacking commands.

Do you see?

In addition to assembler I use the ANSI-C under the MPLAB programming environment for writing code for embedded microprocessors in my work. Whilst 'C' enables me to write code more quickly and is more maintainable than assembler, I contend that the claim that 'C' makes code that is almost as tight and efficient as assembler false. I contend that the 'C' language is unnecessarily convoluted and far from elegant.

For example in an recent project I used the PIC18F67K22, a 8-bitter with a massive 128K of code memory, for a reasonably simple task. In assembler I would have expected my code to fit into less than 32K of memory, but for this project I used 'C' and it filled up about 80K of code.

'C' header files can be hard to find because their path is often implicit, hidden in the compiler configuration. I say that the that MPLAB ought to provide a more intuitive way to find header files.

The 'C' "#define" and user type definition statements are very powerful but lends themselves to hopelessly nested definitions, and an attempt to find out what a label actually means can lead to a long rabbit trail through multiple source and header files that can end in the compiler's own source files. There ought to be a way to display this rabbit trail as a list rather than have to follow it.

I contend that variables in 'C' are too "strongly typed". This often results in the need to prefix a variable passed to an inbuilt function with a non-intuitive cast to stop the compiler generating an error. Which detracts from the whole point of casting and implies another contention - casting is a way to change a variable from one type to another but it is not always clear what information is lost is so doing.  Here is an example from my code: to simplify the main code I have defined a new type "PGMCHAR" and used this rather than the original "const rom char far" to cast a literal string in order to satisfy the use of the inbuilt function "strcpypgm2ram":

typedef const rom char far  PGMCHAR;

strcpypgm2ram(wbuffer, (PGMCHAR*) "Hello world");

Which in any decent sort of language this would read:
wbuffer = "Hello worldd";

I contend that a language like 'C' which claims to give low-level access ought to allow the programmer to do anything that is safe. And yet 'C' does nothing to stop you corrupting memory outside your remit, but does many things to restrict your freedom such as insisting that strings are signed and have to be terminated by a zero. Thus making it impossible to have a string with zero in it, and difficult to use the upper 128 character codes.

IMHO a programming language ought to be intuitive, as close to assembler as is reasonable and with a plethora of simply styled functions and constructs. I have often mused about writing such a language. But it would never be adopted because there is a professional pride thing that makes programmers adhere to 'C' and its many derivatives.

70 years since

D-day landing

It is 70 years since the Allied invasion of Normandy in WWII, otherwise known as D-day. I was born in the aftermath of WWII and my only memories were reverence for and shortage of food - bread scraped with butter with the faintest suggestion of fish paste, reverence for tinned "fruit salad" in having to "dilute" it by eating it with bread and butter, special orange juice provided for infants to boost vitamin intake. My father had been based somewhere in North Africa, but he never spoke to us children about the war. I find the subject immensely emotional and it makes me proud to have been "on the right side" even though I now know more about the atrocities that Britain has committed in other departments. Talk to the Irish...

On this anniversary the news is full of the subject but this one particularly took my attention. I honour and applaud the courage in those soldiers and their readiness to die so that I might be free.

56K

A 56K-ohm 5% resistor

Wire ended resistors, as used in electronics, are generally colour-coded with their resistance value. The value shown has always been my favourite with its green, blue, orange and gold bands.  You figure the resistance value using the table below in which the colours are arranged in rainbow order with a little license either end.

I have never understood folk that need a mnemonic to remember the rainbow colour - Richard of York, etc. Anyone who has messed with mixing colour will surely know the order.

Why give a lesson in colour codes? Because it is another example of my love for colour. I seriously think that the fact that resistors have colour bands was majorly contributory to my earliest interest in electronics.  That together with "small is beautiful" - hence the name I trade under "MICROLITE".

Whilst on the subject what other trade is there that deals in such a range of material sizes?  Resistors are commonly available and commonly used in values from 0.001 to 10,000,000 Ohms. Capacitors are commonly available and used in values covering an even wider range from 0.000,000,000,0005 to 100 Farad. I maintain a stock of thousands of values within these ranges, not to mention inductors and semiconductors.

Whereas in my son-in-law's wood shop his smallest timber dimension might be say 0.001m (1mm) and the largest dimension might be 10m, a range that is hardly comparable!

Song of Albion 2

My title is from Stephen Lawhead's trilogy - chosen because his concept echoes some of my own thoughts. I started this study on music following negative comments I have heard in our church about certain genres of music. I wanted a better understanding concerning music. I quickly realised how little I know about the subject and therefore how unqualified I am to judge. But the study was fun and I use these posts to summarise some of my findings. But first, here are my conclusions:

• Music has hidden power that can touch not only your emotions but also your spirit / innermost being - see here
• Nothing is unclean of itself - it is your involvement with it that may or may not be good, see Act 11:7-9 and Rom 14:14
• Whilst I do well to check out how music affects me, I have no right to be judgmental regarding your views, see Rom 14:4-5
• My duty not to offend others should affect what I do with music, see Rom 14:3 and Mat 22:36-40

If you do not like my conclusions maybe you should read no further - but I would be interested to hear what you think so do please consider leaving a comment.

What is music?

You'll find plenty of and disparate definitions but here is mine: "music is an ordered sequence of sounds that generally include notes. A note is one of an ordered set of tones (a 'scale'). A tone is a sound having musical pitch." A bit convoluted but then I am an engineer.

Music thus is ordered in both in time sequence and in choice of sounds. This order is what distinguishes it from noise. As a reaction against this status quo some exploratory avant garde musicians have tried to remove all semblance of order from their music, like John Cage in his 4'33" - three movements of silence...

and his Imaginary Landscape no.4. which uses random noise from transistor radios...

One has to try a bit harder to define music in such as way as to include these examples!

If you were able to travel back in time to the middle ages or before you would find very different music. Likewise the music of the orient with its quarter-tones might sound alien to western ears. Even in my lifetime church music has changed radically. And then there are all those musical genres to suit different tastes. I would be wary indeed to pounce of one such flavour and pronounce it diabolic without very good cause.

Notwithstanding there is "music" that I personally find objectionable, music that I find very appealing but something within me warns me not to allow myself to become immersed in it - maybe this is my upbringing, maybe not. Anyway I do not see why I or anyone else should not have personal choice in music any less than in colour or food.

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My favourite colour is yellow

I may have mentioned before that my "official" favourite colour is yellow. I say "official" because yellow is the colour I chose to be my favourite when I was at that tender age at which grown ups insist that a child must have one. In fact I love all colours, especially intense or spectral colours.

A computer screen's attempt at a spectrum

A computer screen, digital or conventional camera cannot do justice to spectral colours because they are outside the colour triangle that encloses those colours that can be obtained by mixing red, green and blue. The following diagram from Wikipedia suggests that there are rather a lot of colours that our attempts to reproduce colour cannot display. Sad, because theses missing ones are amongst my favourites.

The RGB color triangle shown as a subset of x,y space based on CIE 1931 colorimetry

Mind you, the human eye is also subject to a similar limitation because it, too, has only a limited repertoire of colour receptors (called "cones"). It is generally thought that there are three types of receptors and they are sensitive to, of course, red, green and blue, with a second peak towards the UV end for the red receptors so that we can perceive violet in the spectrum. So I am not sure what this does to my missing colours argument. Just that if you look back into a prism splitting a collimated (focused) beam of white light, and move your eye along the spectrum so caused, the colours are so, so good, so much more intense that that on a screen or photograph.

Why all this theory? - because I am intrigued with colour.  Indeed when I left the beeb the only material I took away with me was their introductory course notes on colour - which I still have - somewhere.

Anyway - back to the subject of "my favourite colour is yellow".  There is, of course, yellow and yellow.  As a general rule I find that man made things that are yellow (e.g. cars, home decor, clothes) are not the right kind, indeed they often make me want to puke.

You can also see "good" and "bad" instances of colours in creation. A friend of mine, Steve Fouse, wrote a song about this:

In the beginning God said,

"Let there be light"

And in that light

He made many colours,

Each one was separate

And called by a name,

Given a nature in Him

The same.

We are colours

From the inside out.

It's God's nature within us

And it's working its way out.

We are colours

From the inside out.

It's God's nature 

Working its way out.

God, He saw that it was good.

Satan, he never understood.

And those under his spell,

They don't see so well,

They don't see the colours

As they should.

Green can be envy 

Or God's new life.

Blue can be self-pity

Or His authority.

Yellow is a coward

Or God's nature perfect and true.

Red is anger 

Or His blood cleansing you.

If you check out "yellow" in the Bible (KJV) you will find references only to it being a telltale sign of plague (leprosy?) in the law of Moses. But there are plenty of references to gold, the "good" yellow of the Bible, and gold represents the nature of God himself.  You could hardly imagine more opposite extremes. Gold - both the metal and that glorious glow we sometimes see in sunsets, although not a spectral yellow, will qualify as an OK favourite colour for me. Contrariwise the sort of drab and dirty yellow that one imagines is the telltale for plague, or the various yellows used to paint cars and or home decor, are as different as chalk from cheese.

Today I cycled 42.5 miles (max. speed 38.8mph, average 12.0mph and lots of hills in case you wanted to know) along country lanes here in County Wicklow. It was sunny and the hedgerows are full of wild flowers, with red campion and buttercups prevailing. And there is so much May blossom this year - it always reminds me of my father whose birthday was in May. But the buttercups in the sunlight along the way - little flashes of bright, intense colour against the darker green background - an extravagant riot of colour.

Buttercup yellow, I have decided, is my favourite colour.