In the previous blog post, I talked about colour and about the nice bright colours of the photographs I take on my phone. Today, the photos aren’t quite so bright, which is hardly surprising as they were taken after dark with no flash.
I’ve tweaked them a little to make them clearer, though they still retain some of the rather strange brown tinge of the originals.
We tend to think in clichés where the night is velvet black or midnight blue or a rich indigo, not this rather unpleasant shade of muddy purple brown.
Trying to find the word that best describes the colour has brought me to “puce”, which is a colour that I have frequently heard mentioned in books, but never really been able to visualise. Doing a little research to check that it’s the right word, I’ve come across this page Give puce a chance by author Jane Goodman, where she writes about Georgette Heyer’s “preoccupation with the colour puce”. According to Goodman,
‘Puce‘ comes from the French word for ‘flea’ and the colour itself is said to be the colour of the bloodstain which is left on the bedclothes after the flea has been squashed!
The architecture of the final photo is Georgian rather than Regency, but it still seems a good point at which to leave the blog for today and head to the bookshelves to find a Georgette Heyer novel to (re)read.
don't confuse the narrator 