UKRAINE: They are calling it Ukraine's "orange revolution". Challenging the official result of Sunday's presidential election, which gave victory to the Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Yanukovich, supporters of the opposition leader, Mr Viktor Yushchenko, have taken to the streets of Kiev.
On our television sets they have been highly visible through the November murk, for almost every one of the tens of thousands of protesters has been festooned in orange. They wear orange scarves (Yushchenko never appears without one), orange hats, orange shawls. They wave orange flags and banners. Orange is the colour of their cause.
Why? Yushchenko-ites chose the colour to be different: different from the old red of the Soviet Union and the old blue and white that were the Ukrainian national colours (the establishment party of Mr Yanukovich, in contrast, took stolid blue as their colour).
Orange is the colour to break with the past.
The semiologists employed by the advertising companies could have told Mr Yushchenko of the commercial uses of this symbolic property. For the telecoms company Orange is all optimism and novelty (and the Orange prize is the new, iconoclastic award in the literary world).
Commercially, orange signifies freshness. Orange is the livery of ailing UK supermarket giant, Sainsbury's, which confirms its faith in the colour's power by decorating the frontages of its Local stores with huge glowing pictures of oranges. Sun, health, vitamin C.
The company that shook up the air-travel market with its cheap and cheerful approach, easyJet, naturally bedecked itself in orange. Its staff are clad in orange. Happy, easygoing, so unlike their stodgy competitors.
But orange is also alternative, left-field; it signifies a rejection of the predictable palette.
It has the great advantage that it cannot be worn by mistake (red, blue and the rest are too much like the ordinary colours of life). Think of the spectacle of all those Holland fans in the World Cup, the stadium glowing with amiable orange.
Orange is the Dutch colour because of William of Orange, their 17th-century nationalist leader. He has bequeathed the exception to the rule of orange's use. For the Protestant Orangemen of Ulster have taken their colour from him, a Protestant hero.