It occurred to me a couple of days ago that I've been wearing black clothes, almost exclusively, for probably a bit over ten years now. That's quite a stretch of time. Gosh.

I clearly remember why I started. I'd always been temperamentally suited to having lots of clothes looking basically the same, because that way I never had to make a difficult decision when I was getting up in the morning; so at any given time I'd tend to have a few identical nondescript blue-green sweatshirts and a few identical pairs of nondescript blue jeans. Every so often they'd all get too grotty to live, and I'd go out and buy a whole new lot. And one day, when this was about due to happen again, some friends of mine suggested that even if I didn't feel up to making a fashion decision every morning, I could at least make one now and buy clothes in a colour that made it look as if I'd at least given some thought to what I was wearing at some point. Since I was hanging around with goths and near-goths at the time, the obvious suggestion was black; so the next time I went clothes-shopping, I bought black sweatshirts and black jeans instead of blue-green and blue, and switched colours pretty much overnight.

I remember that it felt really weird to begin with. Wearing the same colour most of the time, you get very used to looking down at your arms and body and knowing what you expect to see. So for a few weeks, I'd keep looking down and being startled: ‘whoa, it's all gone black’.

Wearing black has continued to seem like a generally good idea. I'm still hanging around a reasonable amount with goths, near-goths and people who at least have goth sympathies. Dressed like this, I look a bit goth in an environment full of normals (such as my office), and I look a bit normal in an environment full of goths (such as the Calling), but I can move between the two environments without stopping to change clothes and I don't look too far out of place in either place; and somehow I feel as if that suits me reasonably well, because I am the same person in both situations and it seems somehow fitting that I should look it.

But I don't think that's actually why I've carried on doing it. I never really stopped and thought ‘should I carry on wearing black?’, took a mental inventory of my current situation, and decided ‘yeah, go on then’. I just did the same thing I always have: went out clothes-shopping and bought a whole new load of clothes in accordance with my existing policy. The clothes have changed a little (jumpers rather than baggy sweatshirts), but the colour remained the same, not because I carefully decided it should, but simply because it was the default option in the absence of a clear reason to decide on something different. This is typical of me, I now realise: I've always been temperamentally inclined to have a clear separation between (a) deciding what to do, and (b) doing it. Revisiting the decision often doesn't even occur to me once it's made.

So it's slightly startling to look back now and realise that that general tendency to carry on doing today what I did yesterday has caused me to be clad from head to toe in black, with great consistency, for five-sixths of my adult life. It feels, somehow, as if that passive attitude of ‘oh, go on then’ shouldn't have been able to have that big an effect; it ought to have taken effort to be this consistent about it. But it didn't.

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.)