One Man's Colour ...

I love colour and believe that it is one of life's great glories, but until I met my husband - of some years now, I never really gave it a lot of thought. With Sime however, some of our biggest arguments have been over what colour a thing actually is. His notion of a colour and mine do not always match and I am still not sure whether what he sees is different to me or whether it is to do with semantics, or, as I have lately began to wonder if it related to personal association.

Over our years together Sime has introduced me to various colour concepts, some examples amongst others are, that yellow can have pink tones, pink can be brown, lilac grey, there are many shades of black and that what I always took to be a pair of tan coloured trousers of his were in fact green!

Clothing is one thing but when it comes to decorating, well I will leave you to imagine the difficulties that we must sometimes have. Over the years however, my husband has realised that whilst he may have the more sensitive eye, (yes, he is very much a man's man and this has taken me quite a while to concede to) he will actually defer to my judgement as he is also very sensible.

We have over time discovered a few tricks to fix a colour as so often our perception does not match the Dulux swatches, because the experts, as far as we are concerned, get it wrong. So often when we have compared the paint on our wall to the swatch from the shop they simply do not match. And so we resort to 'knocking it back' or 'dirtying it down'; sounds like some command that a porn movie director might make, but these are decorating techniques that have helped us to make the colour more like what we thought it should be.

The other notion that I've had regarding the seeing of colour, is that perhaps there is a genetic trait that makes the perception of its tone and shade something that family members may share that might be slightly different to another family. But this idea was firmly squashed when I was discussing what I was going to wear for a rather grand occasion outfit with my Mum very recently. I showed her my lovely gold taffeta skirt and she said that she didn't think that I generally liked to wear green!