The Gallery: Red, red, red!

It might not seem to you like you that this is a) particularly red or b) particularly Halloweeny. The DH, who is sitting next to me, watching Newsnight speculate about Rooney wanting to leave Manchester United, is equally mistified, and the poor man has been married to me for four years. And yet, despite almost half my life evaporating since I left school, if you were to use the word ‘red’ in a game of word association, school is the first thing that would come to mind. The uniform, sported by a very youthful me on my first term in Senior School (for the record, I am fourth from the left on the front row) was very red. The skirt was designed, one assumes by a man, to be roasting hot in summer and sod-all use against the weather during the winters. They were also pillar-box red, which made you stand out like a sore thumb wherever you went, except maybe in London where you could easily have been mistaken for a bus. Sadly, though, my school was in Yorkshire, a six hour trek from London and a good two hours from any kind of civilisation, and I can assure you that red stands out very clearly against limestone pavements and snow-covered hills. That could quite possibly have been the idea, since it would have been very hard to get up to any mischief in the local area, never mind attempt to buy alcoholic beverages whilst under-age!

And therein lies the Halloween element of the ‘assignment’, since the red skirt was my identity for seven years, I still have nightmares about it!