Peekaboo to fiddlesticks and anyway, since when was a panda white?
After years of gloomy fiddlesticks and a near miss with whirlybird, I have gone with peekaboo and I couldn’t be happier. It might sound like a psychotic episode but I’m actually talking about my hall, stairs and landing. The previous colour — the fiddlesticks — was a mistake that prompted a stronger f-word than fiddlesticks but that, like all my home décor screw ups, I lived with for a long time because I like to get my money’s worth.
When we first moved here, for example, we saved up for expensive solid wood flooring that we then had fitted by mildly threatening idiots across the entire ground floor of the house. When they finally turned their boom box off and left our lives, I looked sadly at their shoddy workmanship and listened to their foreman threaten that we’d ‘get 20 years out of that’. I knew in that moment that the next 20 years couldn’t possibly go fast enough for me. Eventually, for the sake of my nerves, we called time on that folly of a floor about a decade ahead of its best before date and replaced it with a cheaper version fitted by people who didn’t seem to think they were on some sort of candid camera show.
Many years later, when the painter I’d hired slapped the first brush full of fiddlesticks onto the hall wall, my heart sank again as I realised in that single stroke that the colour I’d chosen was too dark for the windowless area. When I tell the new painter this story, he presumes the next bit of it involves me stopping the proceedings at that point and choosing a different colour paint, but he doesn’t really know me at all. Instead, I watched a previously airy space disappear, stroke by stroke, under a depressing colour that didn’t go with the carpet, and then I watched it for about another five years before I could finally justify getting it done again. When I tell the painter this he tells me I’m mad, which I know, and then he asks if the same thing happened in the front room because the colour in there is horrible as well. I tell him I actually love that colour — Charlotte’s locks, if you’re interested — which only reinforces his previous verdict on my mental health.
Anyway, all of this is by way of saying that paint colours have truly stupid names.
Peekaboo might have replaced fiddlesticks on my walls, but unless you lead an extremely uninteresting life, it’s unlikely you’ll know what colour the hall, stairs and landing either was or now is (kind of purple and kind of peach, to save your Googling finger.)
But I could have gone in so many other directions. Hemstitch was an option, as was making memories, baby driver, oyster’s gift, laser, air castle, lust for life, funny face, heaven’s breath, Dorchester blush, otter’s tail, stepping stones, stolen moment, Inisboffin, arsenic, dead salmon and disco nap. And while I quite like the idea of having a disco nap coloured wall, how is that even a colour? You might as well say that semolina is a day of the week. It just isn’t.
I suppose it’s possible that all the people who name paint colours suffer with synesthesia, that wonderful sounding condition where the afflicted experience one sense through another. So while you or I might hear the words stolen moment and think of some sort of Brief Encounter style forbidden love, a paint designer might hear them and think only of green. Perhaps synesthesia is an actual pre-requisite for the job. Either that, or paint manufacturers are massively taking the proverbial.
Take the colour (or non-colour, pedantry fans) white. Now to me, white is white. There might be a spectrum of blues or pinks, but white is just white. But to our friends in the paint world, white can be elder, panda, Victorian, divine, hush, Zurich, baroque, china, linen, designer, vanilla, French, candlelight and half moon — and that’s only from one catalogue. I’ll leave aside the inconvenient detail that pandas aren’t even white, and just point out that nobody has ever said the bride wore hush. In my world, Hush were a covers band that played upstairs in The Laurels in the 1980s and though they were undeniably white, that wasn’t the first thing that struck you about them.
My deep dive into paint catalogues provided me with the additional information that there is a Paint Colour of the Year. The lucky winner for 2024 is what I would call dusky pink, though of course its name is ‘sweet embrace’. Seriously, somebody somewhere is having a huge laugh. Which I presume is a shade of grey.