colour in

Pink has long been a worrisome colour for me.


One of the first realisations of my feminist life was that colour, however vibrant or dull, is never neutral - politically neutral, that is. The commonplace of blue for boys and pink for girls is just the beginning of a long set of expectations about who we are and what we should be - all practical, rough and tumble for boys, and all soft, gooey, sweetness for girls. Given that I have long been a believer that boys and girls, men and women, should be free to be whatever kind of human they want to be, it's no surprise that I spurned the colour pink in favour of all manner of other wonderful colours - like purple, green and white, for instance.

However, a few years ago pink started to wheedle its way back into my consciousness. Struggle as I might, I just liked it. To my guilty horror I felt soothed with some shades and enlivened by others. There's even a safe enough distance between here and the 80s for me to say that I could even consider the combination of pink and grey in some circumstances. Oh, it's been a slippery slope.


Luckily, pink doesn't suit me for personal attire, and so I've been somewhat saved from my descent. But not entirely. In a moment of weakness in Michael's on Boxing Day, my OTL (of all people) managed to convince me to come away with this gorgeous variegated yarn with which to crochet a throw rug.

And so it has begun.

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