When you live in another country you become invisible. Everything you are is hidden. That is the main reason people choose to live somewhere else. Your background, your humour, your ideas, your puns, your education. Everything is blotted out by a magic ink. Of course those things are not really gone. It’a just they become less visible. To those around you, you become a blank page. And they fill you with the colours they like. Only on a clear day you can the see the faint outline of a land across the water. Only on a clear day, people can see through the indigo heat haze to a faint outline of who you are and were.

To my daughters I am white and pink, the colour of blossoms. To my husband I am an appropriate and fitting cream. Not quite perfect enough. In book club, the magic ink stops working, Everything that was safely hidden is made visible: background, humour, ideas and education. A display of rainbows through the prisms of books. With Auster it was almost lurid; we were painting everything indigo and black.

Next the colours of Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea.