Redeem, esteem, the colour tangerine

Anthony Scaramucci, Trump's former White House communications director and now Trump's sworn enemy, has told our ABC that the president is just an "orange fat blob" and a "malignant narcissist".

Scaramucci was warning Scott Morrison to beware of the president's malignant narcissism and orange blobness when, soon, our Prime Minister is feted at a state dinner at Trump's malignant White House.

Then coincidentally in the online Paris Review up pops Larissa Pham's orange-praising essay For the Love of Orange.

Then, in a further coincidence, Thursday morning's revoltingly lurid Canberra sunrise featured for a while a luminously marmaladey tint of orange exactly the same as the one that Trump paints his face.

Back to orangeness in a moment but first I announce that I am going to impose on myself a news and current affairs curfew, a total blackout, during our prime minister's sojourn as Trump's guest.

Sensitive folk find some subjects (like royal weddings) just too sickening to expose themselves to.

Now Trump's state buttering-up of Scott Morrison looms as a real stomach-turner for those of us, patriots, who hate it when our leaders turn to grovelling lickspittles when US presidents flatter them. It is going to be awful.

I just can't face it.

Instead, during the blackout, I will read intellectually-stimulating pieces like Ms Pham's. It's exciting when someone with a good mind takes on an intellectual challenge and of all colours orange (notoriously lurid and vivid, and so of course one of the bogan signature tints of Floriade) is, for aesthetes, the hardest to love.

But Pham does disarmingly well, admitting that she was blind to orange's wonders until, suddenly, "Something odd happened to me in late 2017: I became enamoured with the colour orange."

"That fall, I'd met someone, and orange was appearing everywhere, like some kind of hallucinatory sign ... It was in the flowers in the park, the colour of his [her new boyfriend's] surfboard ... I was seeing this colour as if for the first time, and suddenly [finding it] all around me."

She goes on to explain that in the West we didn't see and know the colour orange until oranges, the brightly-coloured fruits, came to Europe in the 15th century when Portuguese traders brought sweet oranges from Asia.

She's very good, too, on the colour's unappreciated subtleties, pointing out for example that when you go right up to Edouard Manet's 1882 painting Four Mandarin Oranges (it's in Chicago) you can see how there are at least four shades of orange in the fruits' skins.

My sense is that one may have to be madly, passionately, hotly in love (as Pham was when her orange affair began in 2017) to fully appreciate orange (for if sex has a colour then surely bright orange is it). But, now, thanks to Ms Pham, I will try to do better, to not shudder so violently when I see Trump's face, to not flinch so much when I approach the obscenely heaped mandarins at the fruit market and when I see an ugly, Floriadely orange sunrise.

Mention of meteorological matters (colours of sunrises) brings me to a question. Who is the person whose feelings are being reported when ABC radio news weather bulletins tell us that although the official, instrument-measured temperature at the airport is, say, five degrees "it feels like [say] minus 3"?

I do welcome this quite poetic personalising of the weather's description (let's extend it too to "feelings" about wind and rain) but it strikes me that "feelings" about the weather can vary enormously from person.

For example now that I am old and scrawny I feel the cold far more intensely than a Macca's-fattened teenager does. When it "feels" like a balmy dawn five degrees to a plump youngster it may feel to me, out at the same time in the same dawn, like a perishing, marrow-freezing minus three. Windiness, too, is a very personal thing. One anxious woman's howling gale may be another, kite-flying woman's sweet breeze.

And so many of one's feelings about the weather are conditioned by one's personality, by one's mood at the time. Surely, when one is in love, the temperature feels much warmer than it does if one is feeling bitter? If we are to have someone's feelings about the weather broadcast to us then I think we should be given a profile of the person these feeling belong to.

"The temperature at the airport at the moment is minus two degrees, but to Noeleen, 44, in love, a Scorpio, a personally-fulfilled radical lesbian harpsichordist and mother of two it feels like 10 degrees."

"The temperature at the airport is 10 degrees but for Gaylord, 77, a failed Liberal MLA, and embittered retiree whose only hobbies are calculating his franking credits and writing sour letters to The Canberra Times complaining about light rail, it feels like minus six."

Similarly, our personalities influence our "feelings" about time.

Chronologically measured the awful Morrison government's term has two and a half years to run but for Ian, 73, a Sagittarian, left-wing atheist, idealist and dreamer, that two and a half years will feel like 100.