Note of Many Colours

I was given the rare privilege of selecting some materials for the artist today and as a result was confronted upstairs in the art shop by a blizzard of colours. There were so many to choose from I felt like a trapper walking into a psychedelic colourstorm. A colour freak told there were 16.8 million colours. What I hadn't anticipated was that the precise ones I had been asked to zero in on for the artist would end up taking me back with equal melodrama to when I was sixteen. I really was right back there hitching across the continental mainland into the very same colours, slowly making my way through one of the great mountain range systems. Witnessed from the passenger seat of a silent stranger's truck were sun-violet peaks and what I could now read were ultramarine violet rockfaces, cool grey road surfaces, purple brown road signs, phthalo blue wild flowers, and, when we stopped, blue grey salamanders and choughs. Flights are very cheap for the young today so the need to hitch in order to see the world is perhaps less intense. Every time I was to hitch across that continent, however, I was always exposed to the same degree of beauty, the picturesque and picaresque. I am obliged today to wonder just how much of that is lost to the modern young traveller, or does nothing really change? It's just that we seem only to court airports and lookalike franchises these days. A journey seems no longer a journey, just a means to reach a destination. Furthermore, never knowing where your next lift was coming from meant every day feeling like you were an artist in an art shop. Anyway, I returned with the colours the artist had requested and am watching her now. She is on the floor by the wall. It is shortly before midnight. She is beginning her new piece.