I’ve been thinking for the last few weeks about “reframing” memories.

You’ve been given a painting on bare canvas. It’s highly detailed, and the artist has used a wide colour pallet. In fact, there’s so much going on in the painting that it’s hard to know what to look at.

You want to mount the canvas on the wall. It needs a frame, of course, but the only frame available is red in colour.

You pop the canvas into a red frame and suddenly, all the red details jump out. The fire, the dragon, the blood, the howling faces, the broken doors.

You could spend years with the painting, and thinking that the artist intended to create a work shot through with anger and terror.

But.

One day, you find another empty frame. It’s a soft, powdery silver. “I wonder what that canvas would look like framed in a different colour?” you ask yourself.

So, you take down the red, angry painting, prise it loose from its red frame, carefully mount it in the new, silver frame, hang it back on the wall and stand back.

“Funny,” you say to yourself. “Where did that swan with the gracefully curving neck come from? And the knight, in polished armour, and the coins, spilling out from the sack… I’ve never seen any of that before!”

I think you get my point. The colour of the frame hilights certain details.

What colour do you naturally frame your memories in? I’m a bit of a melancholy, and my default colours are red and black, if you know what I mean. Everything is dark horror, depression and failure.

I’m going through a process (I guess you could call it a mid-life crisis) of reframing everything in different colours.

It’s possible to find the humour and the hope in situations. For me that’s a light blue. But there are other frame colours as well that I want to try out, and see what details emerge.

So two questions for you: What colour frame do you tend to use? What colour frame would you suggest I try for my memories?