I was immersed, too, in a kind of odd fugue triggered by Annie’s remarkable photographic project. My granddaughter was doing something I did not fully understand with her identity: it was not what I would have done, nor what Michael might have chosen, nor his mother, and nor indeed Annie’s. It was entirely her own—a way of being British out of Ethiopia that knew its past but was not tied to it, and it had taken her to an interrogation of colour and mind that had not occurred to me as an artist or as a man. I began to question colour itself, to wonder about it as I never had before. I found myself considering the spectrum as an arbitrary designation. Why, after all, should there be seven colours? The answer is that there are not, as my parents could have told me. The rainbow is a continuum of infinitely many colours. Seven is no more a real count than Father Christmas was always red and white. (He was green and silver until the Coca-Cola Company made him their messenger, in case you didn’t know.) Which, in turn, means that between green and blue there are interim colours, just as orange and yellow come between red and green. Even by the crude standard of our inherited awareness of the rainbow there are missing tints which have no names.