The Sky is Blue, the Sky is Grey
Currently 3 images of mine are being worked on for use as Music CD covers. However one of them has me feeling rather guilty.
The other 2 are both drawings; it’s the photograph that has me uncomfortable.
Not because I didn’t have much to do with the subject matter. God took care of that; I simply pointed the camera, though that is a good point you make (see me later). No, it’s because of why I took the picture.
I hate blue skies.
Frequently the #1 image returned on Google’s image search for “Blue Sky”, my photo is just that. A photograph of blue sky.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve nothing against the colour blue. Even sky blue. Sky blue is the colour of my native county after all. Before Heffo reinvented the county colours as blue and bluer, that is. And that was still fine by me. I’ve been going to Hill 16 for over 30 years wearing something blue. And over the same 30 years I’ve attended hundreds of games at Goodison Park to watch in blue another team in another sport.
And I don’t mind the sea. That’s a lot of blue. When it’s not Joyce’s snot green sea. I’ve sailed across the Irish sea more times than I can count. Mind you that’s only because it’s not really the sort of thing one counts, is it? -How many times have you taken the boat to England? -Sixty-three, why?
Did you ever see that film with Vincent Price, a kind of horror thing (Masque of the Red Death?) where they talk about imprisoning a man in a castle for something like 20 years and then releasing him so he would go mad?
Why that would make me happy, not mad, you say. Except I left out the bit where the imprisoner, the bad guy - imprisoning types are invariably bad guys - had the cell painted yellow. All the walls, the ceiling and the floor. And all the furniture. Everything in the room was yellow. For 20 years the man was let see nothing but the colour yellow. And then he was released.
That’s why he went mad. He couldn’t look at a dandelion without having a breakdown. And how do you think he felt about butter on his toast? -Nice to see the bit of sun, said a passing tormentor, and our hero was an instant basket case. A yellow basket case as it happened.
Well that’s what life in America for me was like under a blue sky. A prison. A crushing prison of unbearable beauty. Because yes it means sunshine, and light blasting everywhere throwing explosions of colour all over the shop, with great clarity and striking contrast. And artists need good light. And everybody loves a lovely day. Well I hate them.
Grey days in Kansas City were horribly rare. Oh there were a fair few cloudy days all right, but not really grey days, not the 3-dimensional grey days that hang from the heavens all the way down to your feet and kiss you on your eyelids. You do get wonderful cloud arrangements just before and after the storms with the thunderheads rising up in all their fantastical majesty, but just not for very long. Nope, mostly you got blue. Winter, summer, spring and autumm. Blue.
Blue. We get served no other colour in quanties like it. Even if the grass is green, it only goes to the edge of the world. The blue sky shrouds that, on its way to forever or somewhere astronauts from Kansas have dreamed of. Grey on the other hand, is ever changing. It has tones, and features, and darkness and light, and warmth and danger. Blue sky days after blue sky days, on the other hand, are just bleedin’ blue.
It’s the relentlessness of it that galls me. Growing up in Ireland, blue in the sly was a gap in the rainclouds that you willed, imagined, or sometimes actually saw. Eight of you and a football would crowd into a doorway and spend hours looking up at a blanket of grey just waiting for a feature to manifest itself. Because that was a weakness in the cloud and the place where blue might break out, bring the light, and whistle for the recommencement of the game.
There were exceptions of course. Blue skies came to Ireland for the shockingly long summer of 1976, and then in a wonderful act that fooled many into thinking this is how it would be thereafter, in the reprise that was much of 1977. But since then continued blue skies have been reduced to a special guest appearance in 1983, and a final cameo in the early 1990s. The word in economic circles is that during a Eurovision ad break Charlie Haughey did a deal with god, foregoing blue skies forever for the the totality of the Irish peoples in return for a 2-lane motorway around the capital, the money for a 3-lane motorway around the capital, and a successor to manage the accounts.
More on the Weather in Ireland and America:
• Does It Snow In Ireland?
• I Built An Igloo in Kansas City
• Talking Temperatures in Ireland and America
• An Irish Odyssey in Kansas City
• Do I Need A Coat In Ireland?
• Aldi in America
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