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red and blue are beautiful too

Wednesday 10th June 2009 7:54 PM

Yesterday, even though the world was full of care, I took some time to stand and stare, and noticed that the yellow flag irises in the garden were signalling in some sort of crazy semaphore to a pair of electric, mustard-flashed greenfinches on the bird-table. The birds seemed to understand, and they tried to relay the information to me in song, cheap covers if you like, released on their very own 'Music for Pleasure' label.

Due to their migratory habits and impressionability, the birds sang with an almost impenetrable Swedish accent, but nevertheless, I did get a rough idea of what the irises, via the greenfinches, were trying to say to me, in their strange arabesque, abba-esque way.

It seems, after consulting thousands of buttercups in the field, that in the interests of 'yellow power', they wanted me to uproot the wild geraniums and the dock plants that were growing in and around their stems. According to the irises, anything that's not yellow is, by their definition, inferior. They say that because greenfinches, daffodils, siskins, daisies, buttercups, Wolverhampton Wanderers and egg yolks are all yellow, they're all reflections of the sun, which in their cosmology is the shadow of God, and are therefore all holy. They believe pink to be the colour of sin.

One's initial impulse towards holders of such views should be one of compassion, but nevertheless, this is a divisive and dangerous philosophy, and in the same week that the BNP have gained two seats in the European Parliament, I found their message of intolerance and hatred hugely disappointing. I talked it over with Mrs Abercrombie and we reckoned that the best way to deal with it was education, and so in the evening I did a stand-up gig in the garden, mainly directed at the irises and buttercups.

In between the bee and sore stamen gags, I tried to interweave a narrative that spoke of respect, even celebration, for other life-forms of different chromatic persuasions. I'm happy to say that the overall comedy timing was remarkably unaffected by the greenfinches somewhat hackneyed simultaneous translation, and the gig seemed to go quite well.

During the interval, while Mrs Abercrombie was playing 'Blue Monday' on a yellow cello, one of the finches told me that some of the more liberal irises actually quite liked geraniums, and a few of the more erect ones even admitted to being up for a bit of cross-pollination. However, he added, none of them had a good word to say about dock plants, with the 'they come over here, with their big leaves and deep roots, taking all our nutrient' brigade having a strong support at grassroots level.

As it happens, I was going to uproot the dock plants, but now I'm going to wait until the irises have died off, so they don't get the idea that they've influenced me in any way. Tonight, when I watch England versus Andorra, I'm just going to hope the best team wins, because quite franklampardly, after this iris problem, I don't want to contribute to any more mindless flag-waving .

Posted 7:54 PM | 2 Comments | Permalink

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