I had one of those uncomfortable epiphanies recently. In dire need of a haircut, as my long bob had grown out, I hightailed it to my hairdresser Tania and asked for something more radical. She obliged and I now have a gorgeous short bob with a wispy fringe and two big wings that cut across where my jawline would be, if I had one, almost identical to the bob I wore throughout my 20s.

It looks fantastic and I am gathering compliments (and apparently this cut is becoming known locally as 'A Trish'). The only problem is, my hair looks a hell of a lot better than I do.

Welcome to the late 40s.

I have never much liked my looks and quite how little came home to me one day many years ago - about 20 in fact - when a caricature was drawn of me. I was at a PR bash, with about 80 people in the room, and the caricaturist chose me as the second subject. His first was a skinny red-head with Crystal Tips frizzy hair and massive glasses, and it suddenly hit home to me - I was obviously the second-most ridiculous-looking person in the room.

I managed a weak smile when the artwork was presented to me, but I asked my (then) boyfriend (now husband) to put it away and I never looked at it again except by accident. I would never destroy it - after all, it's the fruit of someone's labour and talent - but it was then, and is now, terribly depressing to look at the bug eyes and miniscule chin and think: is this really what I look like?

A caricature is an exaggeration, of course, but there is more than a nugget of truth in there. And with age, I look increasingly like the incipient Spitting Image that the artist spotted all those years ago - the rosebud mouth, the eyebags, the slightly mad stare that I recognise from my mother.

Back then, I looked like Edina from The Incredibles with my black bob (I rather think, actually, that she was modelled on Edith Head). Now, the bob is slightly choppier and, of course, blonde, but the facial features are more exaggerated and where, five years ago I could see myself in the mirror and flash back to that younger self, when I see myself now, I can flash forward to how I will look in old age. It is not a pretty sight.

Oh la. What can one do? As my skin's relationship with my bones becomes increasingly distant, and wrinkles suddenly appear where there were none before (like wrists, elbows and ankles, good grief), my devotion to yoga and meditation become more necessary than ever.

And vanity-wise, my search for a decent lip pencil to draw back in a fake lipline becomes more urgent, along with finding a becoming shade of lipstick - perhaps something that matches my thread veins?

The search continues…

I've been reading an interesting book on colour psychology recently (review to follow) and I found it utterly fascinating.

Written (back in the 90s) by a psychologist who specialises in colour and has designed everything from interiors to packaging, it is about people's affinity for colour - not the kind of colours that suit you, as we're all familiar with re the Colour Me Beautiful idea, but which colours you should surround yourself with in order to be happy, and what your colour choices tell you about your innate character.

I found it hit the nail on the head in my relationship to colour/design/work etc in some key areas in a way that nothing else has ever approached.

I'm familiar, of course, with the idea of matching your clothes to your skin, hair and eye colouring, but I had never thought before of the difference between admiring a colour and having an affinity for it. They are indeed two different things, and the feelings that you get from different colours tell you a great deal about yourself.

For ease of use, the book uses the familiar designations of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter but rather than this meaning your look (whether you have fair hair or dark eyes, etc), it refers to your character traits. What is more important to you, light or space? What shapes do you prefer, circles or ovals? What kind of job should you be in, front-of-house or back-room?

Four colour/shape palettes were shown and I was surprised at the strength of my reactions to them - I LOVED the Summer palette (wavy shapes and cool, greyed-out colours), and liked the Spring palette a lot (circles, in bright colours such as lime green and lemon yellow), but actually shuddered at the Autumn and Winter palettes (respectively, squared-off shapes in shades like mustard, and sharp triangles in primary colours).

After filling in the attached 10-question questionnaire, I came out very firmly as Summer (7) with a Spring subordinate (3).

The descriptions of the Summer personality were bang on: shy, snobbish, rather reserved, likes opals and moonstones and cabochon-cut jewels, prefers oval plates to round ones and likes all the china to match, goes to great efforts at dinner parties, is thought rather boring by many people, enjoys opera and classical music, painstaking and skilled with her hands. That's a very good description of me.  

A typical Summer, however, is rather a formal person, which I'm not, and here I tend more towards the Spring character - requires a great deal of light, suffers from SAD, is claustrophobic and casual. But the typical Spring also has a sparkling, bubbly personality and makes a good PR person, which is not me at all.

The Autumn personality, it will be no surprise to hear, likes rusty, reddy, mustardy colours, olive greens, brick, stone and wood, and tends to be a person of substance who lives in the country, while Winters are the high-achieving, thrusting, urban ones among us, who like sharp lines, strongly contrasting colours and clean, modern interiors.

It will also come as no surprise to hear that the Scandinavian countries have the highest percentages of Spring and Summer personalities, while Autumn personalities tend to predominate in the African and Asian continents.

When the DH got back from his trip to London, I got him to go through the questionnaire, and to identify what he liked best from the colour palettes and to my surprise, he came out strongly as Spring, with a Winter subordinate (the latter because space is incredibly important to him and he likes monochrome interiors and line drawings).

This was apropos of trying to work out what colours we could compromise on in the house, because our needs are slightly different. Space is the DH's big thing. He can't stand the furniture being pushed too close together, or low ceilings, or feeling cramped in any way. When it came to colours, although he could live with any, the only ones he liked (just nine from all the palettes) were all shades of blue and soft green, exactly the colours he wears every day.

For me, light is the crucial thing. I feel completely miserable if I can't get outside every day, and dark, cosy interiors make me feel totally depressed (I love visiting interiors like this but couldn't live in one). I am welded to my SAD lightbox all winter and when the days grow short I find it hard to get up or to stay awake. I can visit a lovely country pub and enjoy the fire and the inglenook and the dark, heavy beams, but in my own house, what I want is white, white and more white.

And luckily, our needs, although different, overlap. There is no battle between light and space. We have already decluttered the house considerably and in order to maximise light, we are gradually turning the house as white as we can get it. While he was away, I began to paint over the stonework our window recesses, and the difference it made was just amazing: when he got back, he gave me the nod to carry on and do the rest.

We now intend to paint over almost all of our exposed granite, hang white curtains (again, the difference this makes is striking) and paint all the wooden furniture white or give it a limed finish. Soft furnishings will be pale shades of duck-egg blue, yellow and orange, aqua, and sky blue and pink - all colours that are light, bright and 'gay' (in the old sense of the word).

The colour theory idea doesn't work only for us. On the last girls night in, I also tested four friends. Two came out as Summer with a Spring subordinate (we are very common in Western Europe), one as a strong Autumn and one - a 12-year-old - as a very definite Winter. That made us all laugh, as she is going through a Goth phase, painting wounds all over herself and wearing black, while our Autumn friend, we all know, has a low-ceilinged, oak-beamed house filled with Moroccan ornaments and Berber rugs, and herself wears mostly khaki and rust. I know nothing of friend E's interior, but it might explain why friend N is always complaining about her exposed stone walls with pink mortar, and keeps the living room lights on all day long…

The book - sadly costing £32 even second-hand - is The Beginner's Guide to Colour Psychology by Angela Wright. More about it later.



 

Back in October last year, the DH and I finally saved enough money to install our pond. It was something we'd wanted to do for a long time, but we ummed and ahed over the cost, given that there are still so many things that need doing to the house.

But if we had known how many hours of pleasure it would give us, we would have done it years ago. I knew that having a pond would be 'nice', but I really didn't realise how totally absorbing and fascinating it would be, nor that we would spend every possible moment down here with our laptops and mobiles, reluctant to move indoors.

This is a wildlife garden, so we opted for a wildlife pond, focusing on invertebrates, not fish. (Fish may end up in there, but not by our design.) We took instruction from How to Make a Wildlife Garden by Chris Baines, which has been our bible in creating this garden, and followed his instructions pretty much to the letter, creating deeps and shallows, a bog area, 'steps' for critters to get in and out and planting native species.

The result has been amazing. No sooner was the pond filled with water than creatures began to colonise it. The very next morning, it was full of water boatmen and pond skaters, then little black water beetles, then a Southern Hawker dragonfly, some 75mm long, laid her eggs all around the edge.

We begged a starter bucket of mud and weeds from M, a friend with an established pond, and with that mud came a whole host of creatures, including thousands of snail eggs, which - once hatched out - have acted as the vacuum cleaners of the pond bottom, hoovering up algae and rotting vegetation. Occasionally the water goes cloudy, but there is, as yet, no sign of blanket weed or an algae problem, thank heavens.

M also gave us three clumps of lilies with curly pondweed attached (fabulous oxygenators, which spread quickly and efficiently), and I scoured the local streams for other plants such as starwort, water mint and water forget-me-not (I don't feel bad about taking a few clumps of these, as the streams are choking with them, due to fertiliser runoff from the adjacent fields).

Another plant or two has piggybacked, too, including a quite handsome affair with complicated leaves (don't know what it is) and some floating grass with red stems. From another friend came clumps of yellow flag iris, and from another's reed filtration bed, phylaris and other sorts of tall grasses for the bog garden.

Within a week, wriggling creatures were visible in the depths and whirlygig beetles appeared, dodging round each other on the water surface like little beads of mercury.

Now, in May, and despite the terrible drought, the pond is beginning to look wonderful. The curly pond weed has spread like mad, burrowing its way through the mud, and one of the lilies has opened (pink rather than white, much to my surprise, given it was labelled 'alba').

Digging a pond obviously results in a spoil heap and rather than moving this, we spread it out a bit and dug another small pond into it about 1m in diameter. This is intended to become a bog garden, and is very shallow, but it was also instantly colonised with wildlife. The bank itself we randomly planted with whatever seed we had hanging around, including bird seed, which has resulted in a forest of (I think) black mustard plants, clover, poppies and rapeseed, again giving food for visiting insects, and cover for frogs and lizards.  

From being a rather blah part of the garden, which we often skirted around on our morning walks because there was nothing in it, the pond has become the main focus of the entire garden. For weeks now, it's been alive with dragonflies and damselflies, flitting around like mobile flowers. There are blue-grey Broad-bodied chasers, the deep turquoise Beautiful Desmoiselle with its black, fluttering wings, Small Scarlet Damselflies and little turquoise ones (I can't get close enough to work out which species). I had expected one or two, but not 70 at a time, filling the air with colour. The other day, we even had a kingfisher, and a pied wagtail takes a noisy bath each day, using a dead log as a perch. Even bees come down for a drink, landing on the rocks, then cautiously sidling to the water's edge, and in the dusk, the bats appear, skimming the water for moths.

Our cats, which we thought would be fearful, are curiously fond of the pond and love to lie on the railway sleepers, gazing at the water. Birds comes down to drink (as evidenced by the droppings all around), and in the winter, when it was topped with snow, a rabbit had clearly hopped across the frozen surface.

Fifteen bundles of frogspawn resulted in thousands of tadpoles, most of which have gone the way of all tadpoles (they have a survival rate of 5 per thousand), but the bigger ones are now turning into tiny frogs. We even have a palmate newt, which gently tucks her miniature arms into her sides and swims along like a mermaid.   

Being by water is a deep, atavistic pleasure (after all, we humans can't survive without it) but it also teaches you to observe. I did not know that male damselflies clasp the females by their heads and tow them around while they lay their eggs, so they don't become too exhausted; that they pierce the leaves of lilies and plant their eggs inside;  that chasers mate on the wing, and the male then flies around guarding the female while she lays by dipping her abdomen repeatedly into the water; that hawkers (single parents, all of them) land and carefully fold their bodies to position their ovipositors, laying their eggs one at a time; that snails sleep by turning upside down and floating their big foot on the water surface; that water beetles float to the top and at the last minute, turn and poke their bums out of the water, trapping air under their wing carapaces, then dive back down again.

A pond, however small, affords so many lovely sensations - rain pattering on the lily leaves; reflections of the surrounding rocks and plants, or the sky on a sunny day; cherry petals floating on the surface; our Zen-like cats, sunbathing on the rocks, or lapping at their mirror image in the water.

I would advise everyone - if you possibly can, put one in, even if it's just a 2ft square butler sink with a clump of horsetails. You'll be so glad you did.

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