What In Blazes Is Periwinkle?

I really should stop taking vacations. They're too bloody exhausting. I've spent the past two days messing around the house from morning till late at night. And I'll be doing more of the same all the rest of the week. Taking a week off to redecorate my home no longer seems such a great idea.

Still, I must admit that I feel better for the work that I have put in so far. My house does not look particularly different from the way it was last week. But I do feel as if somehow order is slowly being established in my home. It is becoming my castle again. Soon I hope to get planning permission to build a moat.

But seriously, tired as I am, I'm quite enjoying myself. I've always thought of myself as being verbal rather than visual. (As you might have noticed, this is a blog rather than a cartoon strip). My own self-assessment was reinforced by my third-grade art teacher who hated me with a passion. Mind you, as the bearer of the rather unfortunate name Sweety Bhalla, she probably hated the whole world with equal passion. Nevertheless on the matter of my artistic skills we were unanimous: they did not exist.

So years later, when we moved to Singapore and I took charge of decorating our first apartment, I knew there was a serious risk that I would spawn something out of an Andy Warhol nightmare. Imagine my pleasure (and shock) when friends came over to the apartment and said it looked great. Imagine my consternation when they assumed I had nothing to do with it, that it had all been put together by the Significant Other. A pox on all sexist stereotypes!

In fact in some ways men are better equipped than women to be interior decorators. Take colour-matching, for instance. Most women can name at least seventeen shades of blue, and can probably visually identify another twenty-eight or so. So if they have to colour-coordinate furnishings, they are faced with a challenge that is so complex that if a man even tried to imagine it, he'd blow his circuits faster than you could say "Saturday night football". In contrast (pun intended!), colour coordination is much simpler for a man. All he needs to do is to find a light blue curtain to put in the same room as the dark blue sofa, and then it's off to the pub for a couple of beers.

There's a theory that women are better at colour recognition because of evolutionary reasons; in a hunting/gathering society the gathering was done mostly by women, and good colour recognition helped them differentiate fruits from foliage. Men, on the other hand, were hunters, so they did not need the same colour sense. What they did need was the ability to identify a moving object by shape, and track it in motion.

That is why, to this day, a man can spot an attractive girl in a crowd from across a football field. And from then on he can locate her to within a radius of three feet at all times. But ask him about the colour of her eyes and he will draw a blank even after he closes in to a distance of six inches.

Which is a very roundabout way for me to confess that the prospects for my current redecoration project are very dim indeed. Luckily I have a backup plan in case the result turns out to be a total disaster. I'll simply put up a painting of a dark blue sofa in front of a light blue curtain. Then I'll go down to the pub for a couple of beers.