I buy bee protection supplies for tomorrow’s filming date with Martin and his honeybees: yellow Marigold gloves (they have longer wrists) and long sox. Stuart charges the camera batteries and gets the mics etc ready for an early-ish start. On my way from Black’s to the Armada Centre I see Damaris and Steve outside the Bagatelle, and stop for a chat. D tells me that S has just been shortlisted for the Forward Prize: awesome! Steve Spence's first collection of poems A Curious Shipwreck is published by Shearsman Books.
Huge rainbow around tea time, curved from east to south, with extra rings of peppermint green and purple inside. I’m making red pepper and courgette stuffed with mushroom risotto. There are several cloud layers and it’s raining at different levels, so the bow is ultra-bright and saturated with colour in one arc, more faded in other sections. Then the shower drifts on, the bow becomes a hoop, and the violet ring pulsates.

A rainbow is really made up of overlapping bows of different colours from red to violet rather that distinct bands of separate colours. Isaac Newton identified 5 distinct colours: red, yellow, green, blue (cyan) and violet, but he believed that light and sound were comparable and later added orange and indigo (ultramarine), giving the rainbow the same number of colours as notes on a musical scale.
In Opticks: or, a treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections and colours of light (published 1704) Newton describes his experiments into light and the nature of colour, and the conclusions he has drawn from the outcomes.

The note of D starts the sequence: red is placed in the arc DE, orange in a smaller segment EF, yellow FG, green GA, blue AB, indigo BC (smaller, like orange), and violet CD. The segment size is proportional to that colour's intensity in the spectrum. Newton thought that light was streams of particles: the ‘centres of gravity’ - the area of most intense ‘saturation’ (concentration) - of the colours are indicated by lower case letters p, q, r, s, t, u, and x, with red light being refracted least by a prism and violet the most. At the centre is O, representing white light, the sum of the spectral colours.