'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Orange

An orange must have been called an orange because of its colour, but then why wasn’t a lemon called a yellow? Orange is the only one of the seven main colours to have a fruit named after it. There are of course lesser examples such as aubergine, but orange has cut its swathe across our lives to become part of our history and part of almost every day.

We talk of red heads or possibly ginger, but not of orange heads even though orange is more accurate than red, and with today’s hair colouring often more so than anything else. Britain associates the hair colour with a trio of its most famed women leaders; Boudicca, Queen Elizabeth the First, and Margaret Thatcher. These were three ladies who you didn’t want to mess with, and today it is difficult to imagine a brunette or blonde ever obtaining that status. Somehow, the words themselves seem to rule that out. Brunettes and blondes just sound too soft and attractive.  Perhaps a little orange hair dye was all Hillary needed to join the immortal ranks of those mentioned above.

William of Orange came to Britain to save us from Catholicism, and he in turn not only spawned the Orange Men who march across Northern Ireland and down the Eastern seaboard of America, but he also caused the carrot to be orange. It was brown before, but just like Coca Cola turned Santa Clause from green to red, William kept cloning the more orange carrots until the browns became history. William came from Holland and to this day, orange is the colour of their soccer team and probably much more that I don’t know about.

And what is breakfast without orange juice? As much as common sense tells us that grapefruit juice, (what has ‘grapefruit’ to do with grapes?) or any one of a number of other juices would do equally well, the fact is that while some may stray, the vast majority of us confirm that the day must start with the juice of an orange.

First there was the ‘bitter’ orange, which came from Persia and grew all over Southern Europe, then in the fifteenth century the sweet orange arrived from India and quickly replaced it. When these fruit reached the hands and mouths of Northern Europeans, Orangery’s soon followed. In fact a nobleman of that era might just as easily have said, ‘come and see my oranges’ as ‘come and see my etchings’. But why Orangery’s and not Lemonary’s, or even Fruitary’s? The colour and taste of the orange must combine to provide the answer. The colour is as warm as the evening sun and its round shape further reminds us of it. The taste is sweet and yet citric, but that is only part of the story. There seems to be some kind of spice in there. It is exotic without being saccharine and quite unmistakable. It not only reminds us of the Sun, but is the Sun in a galaxy of citrus fruits around which they all revolve.

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