Well it has to be the weather! No wonder the weather is a British 
pre-occupation considering its vagaries. I am sure we were promised an August of wall to wall sunshine.
All those open garden days and summer fetes under umbrellas. I still remember getting married, many moons ago in the height on the summer but in torrential rain!
Pierre Auguste, Renoir and Van Gogh and other late 19th century painters used ultramarine and cobalt blue not just to paint nature but also to express moods and emotions, feeling blue is not only the quieter mind but the colour itself
Glancing down on my Picasa pics I suddenly notice just how many feature the colour blue. I love the moon against a blue black sky, the lavender fields, the visit to Heaven Farm, the sea, our marionettes dressed in blue, the flowers, the beach huts, the amazing patterns in the sky.
Apparently the phrase ‘feeling blue’ meaning low spirits, was first recorded in 1741 and may come from blue–devil , a 17th-century term, or from the adjective blue meaning sad, Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars (c. 1385). The idiom may have been reinforced by the notion that anxiety produces a livid skin colour (according to an American dictionary).
Luckily I didn’t actually turn blue when I jumped into the sea a couple of weeks ago but it may have been touch and go. The water was freezing even if it was on one of the hottest days of summer so far.
Blue, so many shades and contrasts.
Ann Perrin 