Orònya (Mohawk)

By making ‘indigo’ the sixth of his seven colours of the spectrum, Isaac Newton has given rise to generations of controversy. Many of us would label this Nigerian cloth, dyed with a chemical extracted from the indigofera tinctoria plant, as ‘blue’. But it seems that what Newton called ‘blue’ is closer to cyan (the colour I used for my previous bit of rainbow).

Different cultures separate the wavelengths that make colour in different places in the spectrum, so some languages have no names for colours that are clear in English, or names for colours that we don’t bother to distinguish. Russian uses синий (siniy) for dark blue and голубой (goluboy) for light blue in the same way that English uses ‘red’ for, well, red and ‘pink’ for pale red, and it seems not to be unusual for yellow and green to share just one name. So what precisely the Mohawk people mean and see when they say ‘orònya', usually translated as ‘blue’, I’m not sure, but I hope it’s a reasonable match to the indigo here.

Mothering Sunday – By a nifty bit of logistics I managed to borrow my son’s car yesterday evening and drop him off for the London bus, so that after my choir practice at mid-day today I could collect first daughter (from home) then son (from close to where he was getting off the bus coming back from London). It worked and we spotted him striding along the street with a beautiful bunch of yellow roses – for me. But since we had no water in the car, and since we were heading to my brother’s to meet our mum and since I, uselessly, had no present either for my mum or for my nephews’ and nieces’ mum, when we arrived the roses were put in water as a communal present. We left them at my brother’s and sister-in-law’s so I won’t see them again, but I rather like the thought that I can keep the image of my smiling son walking towards me with them and I will never see them die.

Thank you for all the appreciation for yesterday’s spiral staircase, my most popular image for ages.