As you know from recent tales, Violet Towne and I are having our house painted. Now that our home is slowly being illuminated in refreshing shades of clean brightness, we’re beginning to truly appreciate the awfulness of the colours that we’ve been living with up till now.

Take the former colour of the walls of our bedroom. Really, I find it hard to describe to you the true repulsiveness of the hue to which the the previous owners had chosen to awaken each morning. In fact, to my mind it was something that belonged less in the class of pigment than it did in the category of stain, being as it was a shade reminiscent of the flesh of three week-old dead salmon.

What kind of decision process must someone go through to choose a truly hideous colour for the decoration of their place of habitation? Where do they even find the paint to render their walls in such nauseous squalor; colours that certainly never appear on any paint chart I’ve ever seen?

Pondering these questions leads me to suspect that there is a whole class of paint swatches unavailable to People of Taste. Something kept out of sight under the counter with the pebblecrete brochures and garden gnome catalogues. A dog-eared little booklet that remains safely tucked away until a customer with the just the right damp-palmed, sweat-stained, combed-over demeanour enters the shop.

Something with pages that look like this:

Cowlux Colours