In other black-related news, last night I dreamed that a friend of mine was black.

Well, actually what happened was that my dream somehow merged a friend of mine at work with another friend outside work. The dream person's personality seemed to end up as a reasonable half-way point between the two real people's personalities, but the visual effects department didn't seem to have as much effort available, because the dream person looked exactly like the non-work friend but with the work friend's skin colour: a deep rich dark brown that makes me think of plain chocolate and black coffee.

This all seemed perfectly natural at the time (as dreams do), but when I woke up and realised what I'd dreamed I was suddenly extremely startled and went ‘warrgh!’. I think this must be because people can't conveniently change their skin colour in the real world. Dyeing hair is so easy and commonplace that I barely bat an eyelid when someone I know is unexpectedly blonde instead of black-haired, or vice versa, or green or purple. But although cheap and nasty fake-tan products are available, the technology to conveniently adopt a totally different (or a natural-looking) skin colour is not; so if a white friend of mine was black the next time I saw them, then it would indeed be very startling, if only on grounds of ‘good grief, is that even possible?’

(She looked fantastic like that, though. I almost wish the technology was conveniently available.)