wet days and favourite colours

Today was devoted to housework so not terribly exciting.  I try to save the cleaning for a rainy day, and it was fortuitous that today was rainy since I had to clean the house in any event for the beekeepers' committee meeting (or at least the downstairs bits).  I'm stepping down as Treasurer at the next AGM on the grounds that four years is long enough for anybody to be Treasurer, so that external source of motivation will soon be gone.  I'll just have to tell myself that the Systems Administrator and I deserve a vaguely clean and tidy house anyway.

I nipped out into the garden to pick a small posy, to try and brighten the place up.  My first thought was to use some of the hips from Rosa glauca, which were looking lovely the last time I noticed them, but when I looked for them this time I found they had all gone.  The birds had taken every last one.  They always do that with the holly berries about a week before Christmas, so that a fortnight before the day you think there are going to be lots for decorations, and come Christmas Eve the SA is left scrabbling about to find a token few.

There are still some late roses here and there, and with Cosmos and a dahlia or two they made a decent bunch, very pink, but pink is a good colour.  Rather inextricably linked in contemporary western culture with princesses and breast cancer campaigns, but a good colour nonetheless.  Are there any colours that human beings are truly hardwired to like or dislike?  Red is said to be the colour of danger, because it is the colour of blood.  I've heard it stated in a garden lecture that the eye is instinctively drawn to it, hence we should be careful how we used it in garden designs.  I've even read a theory that sports teams wearing red shirts win more often than other teams.  But in China red is the colour of luck, and how does luck equate with danger?  I think the lecturer (it was Lady Skelmersdale) was right about red in the garden.  Red Japanese bridges, gigantic red tree rhododendrons, they do act as optical magnets and you just can't help noticing them first.

The current marker of good taste is to dislike yellow in the garden.  I've never heard anybody say flatly that they don't like blue.  True blues are thin on the ground in the garden, and most blue flowers have at least a tinge of purple.  Nobody seems to dislike purple, either.

It is due to rain tomorrow, but I'm due to meet an old friend in London so wouldn't be gardening anyway.  As we were making the final arrangements she did ask whether I wanted to rearrange, given that the weather forecast was so awful, but I said I didn't mind the rain as long as she didn't. Living in England if you start cancelling your social life each time it's due to be showery you'll soon be a hermit.