This Story is Yellow - by Kathleen Jones
I've always thought about things in terms of colours - the days of the week came up technicolour even as a child - Saturday was white, Sunday pink, Monday a kind of dirty beige, Tuesday blue, Wednesday green, Thursday grey and Friday black. When I was very small, four or five, I used to have nightmares that were all colour and sound. Purple was a particularly awful screech that went straight through every nerve like finger nails on glass. I've never been able to stand purple since. Words, like sounds, have colours too, mostly - though not always - associated with their meanings and images. The word 'home' comes up a kind of warm pink (psychologists please don't bother to comment!), 'trunk' is brown unless it belongs to an elephant, 'harmony' is blue - a kind of lavender blue - 'excitement' a kind of electric blue, and if you just said 'velvet' to me without qualifying the noun I'd hear a rich medieval red. The ul...