I finished Penelope Lively's Consequences: well-written but often bland. This was disappointing as I had enjoyed Lively's Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger. I struggled with the beginning—long passages of extreme happiness can get boring. What is it about misery that sharpens the senses and spurs interest?

Midway, I started Maggie Nelson's Bluets, apposite Lively's prose, which is suffused with pink and gold, the colours of romance and nostalgia. When I think of Dad and Uncle Phillip, their images attain warm colours, because my present is so blue. For instance, all I saw on my walks was blue landscape: sapphire and aquamarine hills for miles, jeweled vistas from a medieval painting.

Blue suited my mood. I stayed away from FB, its relentlessly upbeat and celebratory platform. I wrote a bit at twilight. At times, I felt like a wisp of smoke, caught in a blue bottle.

Today, although still blue, I was cheered up by this sentence: "One of [Stephen] Hawking's regrets in life was not having an opportunity to run over Margaret Thatcher's toes."

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