Yellow

I suppose that this is one of those words that as soon as you see it your mind normally brings up something that you normally associate with the colour yellow. Most of the time I suppose people will associate the Sun with yellow, or if they like them Bananas. Another fruit that most people would also mention with the colour yellow is the humble Lemon.

Just as a matter of point I happen to like both Lemons and bananas and I don't mind the Sun either. If we are not talking about fruit that is yellow, another thing that is also yellow that lots of people like is gold. Now Gold is one of those things that can be spoken about I suspect for pages and pages and here I am not going to go into it here in any great detail.

One thing that has just stopped me cold is the sudden realisation that the word yellow is one that looks strange when you stop to think about it. I don't know at this time where the word came from and I have not yet had the time to look up to see how other people in the world describe objects that are yellow.

If other languages have a very similar word to yellow, I suppose this could mean that we share a common language and a common way of looking at coloured objects. If the English word came from the Latin then it would I suppose be no surprise that a lot of European countries will have a word that looks very similar to describe yellow.

Well after all that I then did a few hours or so of research, like you do and I think I may have got just a bit carried away, anyway here I present what I found, hopefully its not too much in the school teacher mode, I hope you find it at least interesting so lets get on with it colour fills our world with beauty. We delight in the colours of a magnificent sunset and in the bright red and golden-yellow leaves of autumn. We are charmed by gorgeous flowering plants and the brilliantly coloured arch of a rainbow.

I know this is starting to sound just a bit flowery and I appear to be repeating myself but honest I will get on with it and tell you things that you promptly forgot when told at school. We also use colour in various ways to add pleasure and interest to our lives. For example, many people choose the colours of their clothes carefully and decorate their homes with colours that create beautiful, restful, or exciting effects. By their selection and arrangement of colours, artists try to make their paintings more realistic or expressive. And most of the time I think they get it right, an example would be W.Turner and his sunsets, don’t tell me that it does not evoke some of the sunsets that you have seen yourself, this assumes that you are not colour blind, and if you are all I can say is sorry.

It goes without saying that colour serves as a means of communication. In sports, different coloured uniforms show which team the players are in. On the roads, a red traffic light tells drivers to stop, and a green light tells them to go. On a map printed in colour, blue may stand for rivers and other bodies of water, green for forests and parks, and red for roads, well on my United Kingdom maps they do, your mileage my vary.

We use the names of colours in many common expressions to describe moods and feelings. For example, we say a sad person feels blue and a jealous one is green with envy. We say an angry person sees red. A coward may be called yellow, yes I know I am repeating myself, but you may have already forgotten what I said earlier in this article.

So it really goes without saying, but I am going to say it that colour plays an important part in nature. The brilliant colours of many kinds of blossoms attract insects. The insects may pollinate the flowers, causing the plants to develop seeds and fruits. Colourful fruits attract many kinds of fruit-eating animals, which pass the seeds of the fruits in their droppings. The seeds may then sprout wherever the droppings fall. In this way, fruit-bearing plants may be spread naturally to new areas.

The colours of some animals help them attract mates, but you know this, but here I will give you the odd example, a peacock spreads his brightly coloured feathers when courting a female. The colours of many other animals help them escape from enemies. For example, Arctic hares have brownish fur in summer. In winter, their fur turns white, making it difficult for enemies to see the hares in the snow.

Although we speak of seeing colours or objects, we do not actually see them. Instead, we see the light that objects reflect or give off. Our eyes absorb this light and change it into electrochemical signals. The signals travel through nerves to the brain, which interprets them as coloured images. However, there is much that scientists still do not know about how our eyes and brain enable us to sense colour, so if you want to get yourself a Nobel Prize then just work out how we see.

This is another techno bit, actually this bit is really needed, as without it the rest of this article will not make sense so to understand how we see colour, we must first know something about the nature of light. Light is a form of energy that behaves in some ways like waves. Light waves have a range of wavelengths. A wavelength is the distance between any point on one wave and the corresponding point on the next wave. Different wavelengths of light appear to us as different colours. Light that contains all wavelengths in the same proportions as sunlight appears white. Some other mixtures of wavelengths appear white too, and no I don’t know why, is this another Nobel Prize question?

When a beam of sunlight passes through a specially shaped glass block called a prism, the rays of different wavelengths are bent at different angles. The bending breaks up the sunlight into a beautiful band of colours. This band contains all the colours of the rainbow and is called the visible spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, the light appears as violet. It consists of the shortest wavelengths of light that we can see. Farther along the spectrum, the light has increasingly longer wavelengths. It appears as blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, each fading or shading into its neighbouring colours in the spectrum. The longest wavelengths of light that we can see appear deep red in colour.

Light waves are electromagnetic waves, which consist of patterns of electric and magnetic energy. The visible spectrum is only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum the entire range of the wavelengths of electromagnetic waves. Beyond the violet end of the visible spectrum are ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and Gamma rays.

Beyond the red end of the visible spectrum are infrared rays and radio waves.
Such objects as traffic lights and neon signs appear coloured because the light that they give off contains a limited range of wavelengths. However, most objects appear coloured because of their chemical structure. They absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect others. When sunlight strikes an object such as a carrot, for example, molecules in the carrot absorb most of the light of short wavelengths. Most of the light of longer wavelengths is reflected. When these longer wavelengths of light reach our eyes, the carrot appears orange.

An object that reflects most of the light of all wavelengths in nearly equal amounts appears white. An object that absorbs most of the light of all wavelengths in nearly equal amounts appears black.

This is a techno bit on how we see colour, so it goes without saying that we have to mention the roles of the eyes and brain. Our ability to see colour depends on many highly complicated workings of the eyes and brain. When we look at an object, light coming from the object enters our eyes. Each eye focuses the light, forming an image of the object on the retina. The retina is a thin layer of tissue covering the back and sides of the inside of the eyeball. It contains millions of light-sensitive cells. These cells absorb most of the light that falls on the retina and convert the light to electrical signals. These electrical signals then travel through nerves to the brain.

The retina has two main types of light-sensitive cells rods and cones. The cells are named after their shapes. Rods are extremely sensitive to dim light but cannot distinguish wavelengths. For this reason, we see only tones of grey in a dimly lit room. As the light becomes brighter, the cones begin to respond and the rods cease functioning. The retina of a person with normal colour vision has three types of cones. One type responds most strongly to light of short wavelengths, which corresponds to the colour blue. Another type reacts chiefly to light of middle wavelengths, or green. The third type is most sensitive to light of long wavelengths, or red.

The brain organizes nerve signals from the eye and interprets them as coloured visual images. Exactly how the brain makes us aware of colours is still much of a mystery, yes you know what I am going to say here, yes Nobel prize time, some scientists have developed several theories to explain colour vision. And I will have a small section later in this article on the history of colour and how mankind has worked out several theories on how we see; no one has one that Nobel Prize for this work yet!

Some people do not have full colour vision. Such people are said to be colour blind. There are different types and degrees of colour blindness, depending on different abnormalities in the retina's cones. In severe cases, one type of cone may be absent or not functioning. People who have such an abnormality confuse certain colours with others. Very few people cannot see colours at all. Most colour-vision problems are inherited and cannot be cured. This means it’s genetic, that is not to say that at some time in the future ways and means may be found to help cure these problems.

While doing all this wonderful research and as I hope you can tell, rather enjoying it I did come across some surprising colour-vision effects. Many operations of the eyes and brain work automatically and almost instantly in providing us with colour vision. We have learned unconsciously not to "see" certain visual effects of these operations, especially as our eyes adjust to changes of colour. When we do become aware of such effects, they may seem dramatic or startling. Some of the colour-vision effects that we normally do not notice can be easily demonstrated.

We can demonstrate one colour-vision effect by covering half a sheet of brightly coloured paper with plain white paper. If we stare at the coloured area for about 30 seconds and then remove the white paper, the area that had not been covered will seem much lighter than the half that had been covered. It seems lighter because our eyes adapt to colours. Such a visual effect is called chromatic adaptation. These are all good techno terms and I will be asking questions at the end of this article, well maybe not its just amazing just how these technical terms get created.

If we stare at a coloured image for about 30 seconds and then look at a white surface, we see an afterimage. The afterimage has the same shape as the original image but different colours. Where the original image was red, the afterimage will be green. Where the image was green, the afterimage will be red. Blue areas become yellow, and yellow areas become blue. Black and white also reverses. The technical name for this amazing colour-vision effect is successive contrast.

We can also demonstrate that the appearance of a colour is influenced by surrounding colours. If we place the same colour against different background colours, the colour will look different in each case. In addition, a colour appears lighter when surrounded by a dark background than when surrounded by a light background. This colour-vision effect is called chromatic induction or simultaneous contrast.

Sometimes, we may see colours in areas that are only black and white. Such colours are called phantom colours. Phantom colours may be seen by staring at flashing black and white patterns, such as those produced by a rapidly rolling black and white television picture.

I suppose that with all the research that I have done, that I should say something about colour vision in other animals, how they did this research, I think would make another great article, which maybe one day I might write, but back to animals such as Apes, monkeys, many kinds of birds, and some species of fishes have colour vision much like ours. However, numerous other animals see colours differently from the way we do. For example, research shows that crocodiles see colours as various shades of grey. The eyes of certain other animals are sensitive to light that we cannot see. For example, bees can see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to people. On the other hand, bees cannot see the colour red. So it goes without saying that many of our everyday plants we see in the garden in summer look very different to bees and other creatures that can see in other parts of the light spectrum.

Right after all that, I suppose I have to say something about different methods of colour production manufacturers, artists, and craft workers produce objects in a tremendous variety of colours. To create so many different colours, they use one of two basic methods. These methods are mixing colorants and mixing coloured lights.

Let’s first talk about mixing colorants a great variety of colours can be created by mixing colorants. Colorants are chemical substances that give colour to such materials as ink, paint, crayons, and chalk. Most colorants consist of fine powders that are mixed with liquids, wax, or other substances to make them easier to apply to objects. Colorants that dissolve in liquids are called dyes. Colorants that do not dissolve but spread through liquids or other substances as tiny solid particles are called pigments.

When two different colorants are mixed, a third colour is produced. For example, when paint with blue pigment is mixed with paint that has yellow pigment, the resulting paint appears green. When light strikes the surface of this paint, much of it penetrates the paint layer and hits pigment particles. The blue pigment absorbs most of the light of long wavelengths light that appears red, orange, and yellow. The yellow pigment absorbs most of the light of short wavelengths light that appears blue and violet. Most of the light of medium wavelengths is not absorbed but reflected through the surface of the paint. When this light reaches our eyes, we see the paint as green. In a colorant mixture, each colorant absorbs, or subtracts, some of the wavelengths of light that strike it. For this reason, colorant mixtures are sometimes referred to as subtractive colour mixtures or colour by subtraction.

Any three colorants that can be mixed in different combinations to produce nearly any other colour are known as primary colorants or primary colours in paint. A common group of primary colorants consists of red, yellow, and blue. When primary colorants are mixed in pairs, the resulting colours are called secondary colorants or secondary colours in paint. Orange is formed by mixing red and yellow, green by mixing yellow and blue, and purple by mixing blue and red. Colour experts have found that magenta (purplish-red), yellow, and cyan (blue-green) also make a good set of primary colorants. These three colorants can be mixed to produce an extremely wide range of colours.

Mixing equal amounts of three primary colorants results in a colour that is almost black, well I think it looks like mud. However, special black colorants, such as a fine black powder called carbon black, provide better blacks. Mixing black with a colour produces a shade. Primary colorants absorb much light, and so they cannot be mixed to produce very light colours. For such purposes, either a chemical compound called titanium dioxide or some other special white colorant must be added. Mixing white with a colour produces a tint. The combination of black and white forms grey. Mixing grey with a colour creates a tone.

After all that talk about pigments and such things I want to talk about mixing coloured lights. When lights of different colours are projected together onto a screen, they blend and form new colours. Mixing coloured lights produces new colours differently from the way mixing colorants does. Mixing colorants results in new colours because each colorant subtracts some wavelengths of light. But mixing coloured lights produces new colours by adding light of different wavelengths. For this reason, coloured light mixtures are sometimes called additive colour mixtures or colour by addition.

In an additive colour mixture, the primary colours differ from those in paint. The primary colours in light are red, green, and blue. When red and green lights are mixed, the result is yellow light. A mixture of blue and green lights forms blue-green light, and blue and red lights form purple light. If you combine all three primary colours in light in the proper proportions results in white light. Now don’t forget I am talking about light not pigments, otherwise what you get is called mud, e.g. not black but a horrible brown mush of a colour. And don’t say that you never made mud in art class, because everyone I have spoken too seems to have done it.

The colours of any two lights are complementary if they form white light when mixed. Therefore, the complementary colour of any primary colour in light is the colour formed by combining the two other primary colours.

The complement of blue is yellow (red light plus green light). The complement of red is blue-green (blue light plus green light). The complement of green is purple (red light plus blue light). Not sure that I am telling the truth?

Well why not go look it up I was surprised that all the above was true.

Colour television pictures are created by additive mixtures of the three primary colours in light. A colour TV screen has thousands of tiny areas that glow when struck by a beam of electrons. Some areas produce red light, others produce green light, and still others produce blue light. When we watch a colour programme, we do not see each red, green, or blue area. Instead, we see a range of many colours produced when the red, green, and blue lights blend in our vision. We see white light when certain amounts of red, green, and blue light are combined. The combining of the primary colours to produce white light makes it possible for a colour TV to show black-and-white pictures.

When neighbouring colours have a pleasing effect, we say that they produce colour harmony. In selecting clothes or decorating homes, many people consider which colours look good together. Artists and scientists have developed guidelines for combining colours. But there are no fixed rules of colour harmony because too many factors affect whether colours go well together.

A colour circle, or colour wheel, shows the relations among colours. It is a helpful tool for choosing harmonious colour combinations. A colour circle consists of a range of colours in the form of a circle. The colours run from red, through the other colours of the spectrum, and back to red again. Three colours an equal distance apart on the colour circle are called a colour triad. The colours in a triad often go well together. The primary colours on the colour circle red, yellow, and blue form a triad. The secondary colours green, orange, and purple are mixtures of two primary colours. They lie at equal distances from the primary colours and also form a triad. Intermediate colours are mixtures of a primary and a secondary colour. They lie between primary and secondary colours. A mixture of two secondary colours forms a tertiary colour.

Any two colours that lie directly opposite each other on the colour circle are called complementary colours in paint. Such pairs of complementary colours include red and green, orange and blue, and yellow and violet. Complementary colours often go well together. A colour also may harmonize with colours that lie next to its complement, such as red with blue-green or yellow-green. Such colours are called near-complementary colours or split complementary colours. Colours that lie next to each other on the colour circle, such as blue-green, blue, and blue-violet, also may form pleasing combinations. Monochromatic colour schemes are made up of shades, tones, and tints of a single colour. Such colour combinations can create pleasant effects.

This is where I go even more techno and get down and dirty on characteristics, so every colour has three basic characteristics. They are hue, lightness, and chroma. Colour experts describe an object's colour in terms of these characteristics.

So let’s talk about the first characteristic and that is hue, hue is the property that gives a colour its name for example, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or violet or a combination of such names. The dramatic differences that we see among the colours in the spectrum are produced by very slight differences in the wavelengths of light. For example, the wavelengths that appear as yellow are only slightly shorter than those that appear as orange. But there is a great visual difference between orange and yellow. This difference is a difference in the hue.

Lightness is a measurement of the amount of light reflected from a coloured object. The lightness of a colour may be expressed by comparing the colour's level of reflected light with that of samples on a lightness scale. A lightness scale runs from black, through shades of grey, to white. Black reflects very little light. A colour that reflects about the same amount of light as black has a very low lightness level. Grey reflects more light than black. Thus, a colour that reflects about the same amount of light as a shade of grey may have an intermediate level of lightness. White reflects nearly all the light that strikes it. Therefore, a colour that reflects about the same amount of light as white has a very high lightness level. Colour experts use the term brightness to describe the lightness level of a coloured light source.

Chroma is a measurement of the saturation of a colour. For example, a teaspoon of red poster paint powder mixed with a teaspoon of water produces paint of a deep red colour. The paint has a high concentration of red colorant, and so it has a high chroma. If we dilute the paint with a cup of water, the resulting mixture will have a low concentration of red colorant and, therefore, a low chroma.

It goes without saying that some one has to try and classify colour, so it should be no surprise that yes indeed that is what has happened and that from my research I have found two common ways of classifying colour, so without more delay lets talk about how colours are classified. Experts estimate that we can distinguish perhaps as many as 10 million colours. Each colour differs from all others in some degree of hue, lightness, or chroma. Our names for colours are far too inexact to describe accurately all the colours we see.

As a result, people often have difficulty trying to describe or match a certain colour. Matching colours is especially important in such industries as paint and textile manufacturing. Manufacturers of paints and textiles must minimize differences in the colour of a particular paint or fabric from one batch of paint or bolt of fabric to another.

To overcome problems in describing and matching colours, colour experts have developed various systems of classifying colours. Two widely used classification systems are the Munsell Colour System and the CIE System of Colour Specification.

The Munsell Colour System is one of the most popular and useful means of classifying colours. It was developed in the early 1900's by Albert H. Munsell, an American portrait painter. The system classifies colours according to the three basic characteristics of hue, lightness, and chroma. However, Munsell used the term value for lightness.

The Munsell system may be displayed in many ways. A common display shows samples of different colours arranged around a vertical axis. Different hues are arranged around the axis like the spokes of a wheel, with each spoke consisting of a different hue. The axis serves as the value, or lightness, scale. It is divided into 10 sections. These sections correspond to 10 levels of value from black at the bottom, through shades of grey, to white at the top. All colour samples at the same level have the same value. Colours close to the axis have low chroma. The farther from the axis a colour is located, the higher is its chroma.

To match a particular colour using the Munsell system or a similar system, one must find that colour among the colour samples provided. However, the number of samples in such systems cannot approach the number of colours we are able to distinguish. For this reason, it is sometimes impossible to find an exact colour match.

Let’s now talk about the CIE system of colour specification. Manufacturers of such products as foods, paints, paper, plastics, and textiles must often match colours precisely. Because colour vision varies among people, two colours that match for one person may not match for another. For this reason, manufacturers do not rely on the human eye to match colours precisely. Instead, they use the CIE System of Colour Specification. CIE stands for Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage, (International Commission on Illumination), an international organization that establishes standards for measuring colour which as all you clever readers out there know is French.

A paint manufacturer who wants to produce the same colour of green paint at two factories may use the CIE system to make sure that the two greens match. First, colour experts analyse the colour of the green paint made at one factory to determine the wavelengths of light that compose it. They make the analysis with a spectrophotometer. This instrument separates the light reflected from the paint into its various wavelengths and measures their intensity. Then, tables of numbers are used to convert this information into three numerical values one for each of the primary colours in light, which will match the original green when mixed. These tables of numbers, called standard observers, define the colour-matching properties of a human eye having normal colour vision.

The paint made at the second factory is also analysed using a spectrophotometer. Small amounts of pigment are then added to adjust the colour of the paint. Pigment is added until the analysis results in the same three primary colour values that were produced by the paint made at the first factory. When these three primary colour values are reached, the two green paints will match, even though they may contain different mixtures of pigments. I now purpose to leave this classification of colour as it can get even more complicated, and I think I have gone into it as far as I want to here, I suspect that you could if you wanted to go to the library and find some very thick volumes which you could read for the next few years on the subject.

This is where I present my research on the early theories of colour vision. Many thinkers in ancient times developed theories about the nature of colour. Since then, scientific experiments have confirmed some of their ideas and disproved others. I also would like to state here that for some reason progress was very slow, why this should be I just don’t know.

Empedocles, a Greek philosopher of the 400's B.C., believed that colour vision was caused by tiny particles that were given off by objects and passed through the eyes. He thought that the eyes either produced a colour reaction to the particles or recognized them as coloured. In the early 300's B.C., the Greek philosopher Plato proposed that colour vision was caused by rays that shot out from the eyes toward objects. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher of the later 300's B.C., may have been the first person to realize that there is a relation between colour and light. However, he also thought that colour was caused by something transparent between objects and the eyes. Galen, a Greek doctor of the A.D. 100's, believed that colour vision arose because rays from the eyes empowered the surrounding air to carry tiny images of objects to the eyes. He thought that these images then were analysed by a visual spirit which moved between the eyes and the brain, well he could not use any modern terms as they had not yet been invented.

As the early 1000's, turned up, an Arab physicist known as Alhazen recognized that vision is caused by the reflection of light from objects into our eyes. He stated that this reflected light forms optical images in the eyes. Alhazen believed that the colours we see in objects depend on the light striking the objects and on some property of the objects themselves, which I think is a brilliant bit of thinking I suspect at that time he must have been the only person on the planet who had this insight.

Thing then started to progress some what and during the late 1600's and early 1700's, Sir Isaac Newton, an English scientist, yes that bloke who told us all about gravity, performed many experiments to investigate the nature of colour. Using a prism, Newton demonstrated that white light contains all the colours of the rainbow. He also was the first person to show that coloured lights can be combined to form white light. Newton realized that light rays themselves are not coloured but that the sensation of colour is produced in the brain.

Not to be left behind by a mere Englishman, during the late 1700's and early 1800's, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German poet, experimented with coloured lights and shadows. He wrote a book on optics that seemed to contradict many of Newton's findings. Goethe did not believe that coloured lights could be combined to form white light. He thought that all coloured lights were actually mixtures of light and darkness. Goethe's experiments were useful in demonstrating many aspects of colour vision. However, Goethe's theories of colour vision based on these experiments are no longer accepted as being the whole answer to question.

The three-component theory of colour vision was first proposed in 1801 by a Thomas Young, who was an English physicist. It was further developed during the 1850's by a German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz. The theory proposes that the eye has three types of fibres that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light. When light strikes the fibres, they generate electrical signals that travel directly to the brain. According to the three-component theory, the colour sensations that arise in the brain correspond to the electrical signals in a simple and direct way. Scientific experiments have confirmed the existence of the three types of fibres, which are now called cones. Each type of cone is particularly sensitive to one of three general ranges of wavelengths of light--those corresponding to red, green, and blue.

The opponent colour theory was proposed in 1874 by Ewald Hering who was a German physiologist, who went on to suggest that, somewhere in the nerves of the eyes and brain, there are two response mechanisms, each of which involves a pair of opposing colours. This means that the response mechanisms can signal only one of the two colours at a time. One response mechanism signals either red or green, and the other signals either yellow or blue. A third mechanism signals the level of lightness. The brain interprets these signals, producing our sense of colour.

The opponent colour theory explains many aspects of colour vision better than the three-component theory does. For example, the opponent colour theory provides an explanation for the fact that we see no such colours as reddish-green or yellowish-blue, I must admit that when I found out this bit I had to stop and think, just to check that my research was correct, I am glad to say that it’s all true.

From my research the most recent theories combine ideas from the three-component and opponent colour theories to describe the various stages of colour vision. In the first stage of colour vision, three types of cones in the retina, of the eye absorb light and generate electrical signals, as proposed by the three-component theory. During the second stage of colour vision, nerves in the eyes and brain create three new signals, which correspond to those described by the opponent colour theory. The nerve signals may pass through further stages before the brain finally interprets them as the sensation of colour, or what the brain thinks of or we think of as colour.

Well that’s it I have nothing more to say on yellow and colour, I bet that you could write a whole thick book on it if you really tried.
My favourite Things

I suppose that this could be about anything I like. So what I propose to do is to just talk about those items that have had or have some personal attachment to me in one way or another.

I should state here and now that some of the things that I want to talk about are really very personal tome and that you may say that’s silly that a man of your age should have that as a favourite thing, but hey this is my writing and if you don't like it do some of your own.

The first favourite thing that I have, I suspect that this is one of those items that you may call silly for a grown man to like is...Bagpuss.

You may ask what is a Bagpuss? The answer is that he is a saggy old cloth cat that has bright pink stripes and was the star of thirteen half hour children’s programs back in the 1970's. So this really is a childhood favourite of mine.

Why? You may as and the answer is that the programmes where very well made and the stories where written in such away that you had and wanted to stay to the end to find out what happened. The shows had music that was okay and normally fitted in with what was going on in the particular show.

It goes without saying that my kids have picked up on this like of mine and so I am now the proud owner of a DVD of all the episodes ever made, and also a stuffed Bagpuss. Once sometime ago I did have a mobile phone with the theme tune to Bagpuss as the ring tone, but sadly the phone that it was on has seen better days, in fact the phone has gone the way of the Dodo and has stopped working, and my new phone dos not have a way of putting your own tunes on to it. You also find that going to one of these ring tone companies, they do not offer Bagpuss as a downloadable tune.

So what other things are my favourite things, well some of them are very mundane such as a tune or album by a particular artist, a favourite dish.

What you ask is my favourite dish? That would be ham eggs and chips, which is a simple meal that has lots of different flavours and tastes and is easy to do if you are short of time.

Another thing that is a favourite is those big power kites that you see pulling people along the beach while they are sitting in a 3 wheeled buggy at speeds of up to 50 mph. it is a sport that is great fun and can at times be very dangerous, but like other extreme sports it is only as dangerous as you want to make it.

If you want to go out to the very edge then the chances of you getting hurt go up, but the frill also goes up. I suppose it’s a bit like skydiving or motor racing or any other extreme sport.

The next thing that is a favourite thing is I think a bit of a cheat as you can not call the love of your life a thing. But I have to state that my wife is a favourite thing that I also love very much, but as you can't own your wife anymore, she will just have to be one of my favourite human beings that I love to be with. Also in this category I will have to put my two children as well, they are important to me and I do love them.