Aquamarine

For perhaps the first time, certainly for the first time that I can remember, I have seen aquamarine in the sea today, aquamarine not being a colour I associate with the sea around our shores, despite the name. While if holiday advertisements in the weekend newspapers are anything to go by, you may well get it in the tropics - where I have never been, having barely made it into the northern sub-tropics. Otherwise known as Tenerife.

But today we had flashes of aquamarine in the sea off Felpham, just east of Bognor, an hour or two short of high tide. Horizontal flashes of the stuff in the sea when the bright afternoon sun caught a bit of wave in the right way, whatever that might have been.

I celebrated by finishing off the 'James Grieve' apples that we had bought from the farmers' market at Arundel yesterday, from a chap who said that he only grew them as pollinators for his Bramley crop. This particular variety of apple used to be my favourite as a child, being a big apple, both tart and sweet, with not too strong a flavour. You don't get them much in shops as they neither keep nor travel. I did have a tree on the allotment, but I don't recall the apples being anything like as good as these were. Nice to have an apple, for once in a while, that has not seen the inside of an atmosphere controlled storage facility.

The illustration has been produced by using a custom background colour on a Powerpoint slide using the RGB code (0, 255, 191), with 255 being the maximum, one of three code triples offered by wikipedia.