THIS ISLAND LIFE
I’M thinking of embarking upon a new career while the dim light of creativity still gutters and flickers.
It will involve a bit of writing but, as it will mean the production of only one or two words at a time, it shouldn’t present too much of a problem.
I’m referring, of course, to making up names for paint colours, which are becoming more abstract, whimsical and meaningless with each passing year.
I was looking at a Crown brochure the other day and it seems anything now goes as long as the word on the pot sounds vaguely beguiling, endearing or chic.
There was a time, back in the good old Dulux days, when you were offered a selection of basic pigments with two alternatives — light or dark.
Therefore, if a decorator suggested cream for the ceiling and pale coffee for the walls, you had some idea what your front room was going to look like when you got back.
Nowadays, he’s more likely to come up with Liqueur for the ceiling and Avantgarde for the walls.
This is all very well but there are about 40 different-coloured liqueurs, while I have yet to see an 'avantgarde’ of any hue. It is a concept; it can’t possibly be a meaningful colour.
I am now going to list some paint colours, and I want you to guess which are genuine and which I have made up — Gentle, Etiquette, Essential, Tempting, Expectation, Bespoke, Ballgown, Lady Jayne, Promenade and Sophistication.
Give up? I don’t blame you. Let me put you out of your misery by confirming they are all included in the Crown pamphlet I have before me.
But this is the fun bit — what colours do you think they actually represent?
The unlikely answers are as follows: Gentle (mauvy pink), Etiquette (a darker shade of Gentle), Essential (a darker shade of Etiquette), Tempting (chocolate brown), Ballgown (dark indigo blue), Bespoke (olive green), Lady Jayne (dirty white), Promenade (sludge green), Sophistication (metallic grey), Avantgarde (light mushroom) and Liqueur (very pale primrose).
If anyone from Crown is reading this, I offer you the following names free of charge for your next brochure — Linger, Serendipity, Sensual, Distant Hope and Faraway Gaze. You can invent the colours to go with them.
Come to think of it, they all sound like book titles by Barbara Cartland. But if you like them, get in touch and we can do some business, because there’s lots more where they came from.
A final word of warning to all DIY-ers. Daubing your home with Crown paint could be a risky business if you are not careful with your blends.
If you mix Lady Jayne with plenty of Liqueur, add a dash of Tempting and then forget to add some Etiquette, you could end up nine months later with an Expectation — and that’s grounds for divorce.
It’s important but not that much
SOMETIMES I think TalkTalk does it deliberately. My computer was running so slowly last weekend, it would have been quicker to carve this column in stone and send it to the County Press on the back of a lorry.
Time, then, to call their optimistically-entitled 'helpline’. The usual disembodied voice steered me through to 'faults’, where I was met with the familiar wall of noise masquerading as music.
On and on it went, though a woman kept popping back at regular intervals to thank me for my patience, insisting my call was important to them and ensuring me I was 'moving up the queue’.
Unfortunately, my call was not important enough for them to actually answer it and ten minutes passed before I sensed the queue must be thousands of people long and I wouldn’t be talking to my old mates in India any time soon.
These blokes have become like old friends over the months. It won’t be long before we’re swapping family pictures and visiting each other’s homes for holiday.
Twenty minutes later (I’m nothing if not stubborn) I finally hung up and realised the continual loop of musak which had been playing the entire time was called Together at Last.
TalkTalk will have their little joke …
Not to be sniffed at
REMEMBER my whinge a few weeks back about the fact I had become allergic to either newspaper ink or newsprint and bemoaning the fact exposure to the CP regularly reduced me to tears?
I thought I was alone in my discomfort but sympathetic words have reached me from Shanklin.
Mrs Sylvia Greville wrote to say she suffered the same symptoms when reading the County Press 'and one of the tabloids’. (My money’s on the Daily Mail).
She added: "All my contemporaries used to laugh at my predicament but, thanks to you, they are beginning to sympathise.
"Being a Caulkhead, I read the CP from beginning to end and it usually takes me a few days.
"I go a page at a time, all the while having my hankie at the ready and continually scratching the end of my nose!"