Y is for...

Yellow.

Contrary to what most of the entries on this blog might lead you to believe, my favourite colour is neither dark nor depressing. No, it's yellow. A bright, sunshiny yellow.

When I was a child, my mother had very set ideas as to what colours a redhead could and couldn't wear. In the former category, there was dark green, dark blue, brown, dark purple and grey. In the latter, all the others. Every photo of me from about the age of 4 up has me wearing one of those dull, drab colours. And I yearned for a yellow jumper. Or red. Or orange. Or anything not "dark".

Added to this was the fact that all British schools have uniforms, and they're frequently dull and drab too. In the many schools I attended, I had a navy blue uniform (white shirt, red tie), a hideous brown and yellow combo (yes, there was yellow, but the uniform was still predominantly brown), a dark green + kilt combo and, for my entire middle school period, a grey-green monstruosity (white-and-green striped shirt, beige jumper and socks, burgundy cape. Yes, a cape. An ankle-length cape).

As a teenager, my parents never gave me an allowance, so I still depended on my mother for the clothes I wore. She "let me choose", but I was never in any doubt as to what she thought suitable. I managed to get her to accept lilac and turquoise, but there was still a lot of dark - navy blue, dark purple, black. With my white, white skin I probably looked more like a corpse than anything.

It wasn't till I went away to university that I finally (eventually) plucked up the courage to wear clothes that friends told me suited me, but that I knew my mother would hate. Above-the-knee skirts, for example, and fitted clothes (my mother was obsessed with the fact that I was fat, even though I've never been fat in my life. Just fatter than her. But she weighed little more than 6 stone (around 90 pounds, maybe, or 40 kg) and was 4 inches shorter).

The day I travelled home for Christmas after my first term in St Andrews, I was wearing an emerald green shirt,  pale green mini-skirt and Doc Martens. My mother almost fainted.

It was liberating. After that "success", I went wild, wearing the wildest, brightest clothes on earth - I went to a formal dance pretty much dressed as a deck chair, with a red-yellow-white striped Lycra mini-dress, gold tights and red T-bar sandals with a vertiginous heel.

Now, I've calmed down a fair amount, but still don't buy into the French thing of wearing black all winter and navy, white and beige all summer. I do have black clothes, and some beige, a little white. No navy, though, and no dark green. Almost no brown, either.

I have yellow, though. I also have yellow kitchenware, yellow walls, yellow jewellry. It's a colour that brightens my mood (and heaven knows it's needed brightening of late), warms me up, makes me feel that there's something good in the world.

Yellow is a good colour.