4 December: Brown

Today is Wear Brown Shoes Day. Here are ten things you might not know about the colour brown.

1. The first recorded use of the word brown to describe a colour was in 1000. Its roots lie in Old English and German words for a dark colour, or a shining quality (the word "burnish" comes from the same root). In other languages, the word for brown is often from the word for something brown that people eat or drink, like Chocolate, Coffee or Tea.
2. Words for shades of brown include Siena (from the colour of the soil around the area of Siena in Italy), beige (from the French word for the colour of natural wool), taupe (from the French word for a mole), russet (from the coarse brown cloth of the same name), dun (from the Gaelic for brown).
3. Brown can be made by combining red, Black and Yellow; red, yellow and blue or Orange and black. On TV and computer screens, brown is made by combining red and Green.
4. Brown is a common colour in nature. Wood, soil and animal fur are often brown. The most common colour of the human eye is brown; brown is the second most common human hair colour after black. The word brunette is the French word for a woman with brown hair.
5. Human skin is largely various shades of brown, even though the words "black" or "white" are usually used to describe skin colour. The brown in skin is caused by melanin, a natural pigment which protects the body from ultra violet light. The skin darkens to a deeper brown when exposed to sunlight. "Brown as a berry" is an expression meaning suntanned.
6. Brown is the least popular colour according to surveys, because people tend to associate it with plainness and poverty. Only one percent of people say brown is their favourite colour.
7. The Roman word for poor people was "pullati" which literally meant "those dressed in brown". Franciscan monks wore brown robes to emphasise their poverty, and in England in 1363 there was actually a law passed that required peasants to wear brown.
8. In prehistoric times, cave painters, such as those who painted the Lascaux caves, used a pigment called umber, which was clay composed of iron oxide and manganese oxide. Art using umber has been dated to 40,000BC. The Greeks and Romans used sepia, a pigment made from cuttlefish ink. Sepia was also used by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci. Medieval artists didn't use brown all that much - they preferred brighter colours like red, blue and green. Brown wasn't widely used by artists until the late 15th century. While most brown pigments were made from earth and clay pigments, there have been brown paints made from chestnuts walnuts, and even ground up Egyptian Mummies.
9. Why is poo brown? The brown colour of poo is caused by a chemical called bilirubin, a by-product of the destruction of red blood cells.
10. In the 1920s brown was the colour adopted by the Nazi party as a uniform colour. Nazi paramilitaries were known as brownshirts; voting Nazi was referred to as "voting brown" as that was the colour used to represent the party in election maps. Hitler slept in brown satin pajamas with a swastika embroidered on them, under a brown quilt with a huge swastika on it.

Golden Thread

Terry Kennedy is inexplicably and inexorably drawn to the small town of Fiveswood as a place to live and work after university. He is sure he has never visited the town before, but when he arrives there, it seems oddly familiar.

Fiveswood has a rich and intriguing history. Local legends speak of giants, angels, wolves, a local Robin Hood, but most of all, a knight in golden armour. Fiveswood's history also has a dark side - mysterious deaths blamed on the plague, a ghostly black panther, and a landslide which buried the smugglers' caves.

Terry buys an apartment in The Heights, a house which has been empty for decades, since the previous owner disappeared. Now he has finally been declared dead, developers have moved in and turned it into six flats. Terry has the odd feeling he has lived in this enigmatic house before. But that is not all. Since childhood, Terry has had recurring, disturbing dreams which have been increasing in frequency so that now, he has them almost every night. To his dismay, the people from his nightmares are his new neighbours.

Except, that is, for Eleanor Millbrook. She is refreshingly unfamiliar. After Terry saves her from a mysterious attacker, they become close. However, Terry's nightmares encroach more and more on his waking life, until they lead him to a devastating discovery about who he really is.

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