shewhomust | Talking blues

J. invited us to dinner on Friday. She doesn't need a reason to do this, and we didn't need a reason to accept, gladly. Nonetheless, there were two reasons: it was an opportunity to catch up with our old friend C., who was visiting; and she wanted

durham_rambler's help setting up a subscription to ink supplies for her computer.

So while

durham_rambler wrangled the computer (with only partial success) and J. cooked, C. and I chatted: about what she and J. had done over the past few days, and about holidays past and planned, and fmily and old friends - and eventually C. told me about a conversation she had had with someone I didn't know, about the many words for shades of blue. They had competed to find the most obscure word, and C. had won with a name she could not now remember, though she thought it was the name of an artist, and maybe something to do with tiles.

So we dived down that rabbit-hole, and listed all the shades of blue we could think of; we discussed the difference between blue, green and turquoise; I told her about the exhibition of cyanotypes we had seen, and what I had learned there about the colour cyan; we dismissed sky blue and the blue traditional in the robes of the Madonna; I fell asleep that night thinking about periwinkles, and indigo, and Alice blue (favoured by Alice Roosevelt, apparently) and the wine-dark seas (blue being something for which the Greeks apparently did not have a word).

The next day C. messaged to say that she had remembered the name of Jacques Majorelle and the garden he created in Marrakech, painting the walls of the villa in an intense shade of blue ispired by the local use of colour and coloured tiles. This morning I looked it up, and found many extremely pretty pictures. I won't say I had never heard of it, because the Yves Saint-Laurent connection is faintly familiar - but I would not have thought of it in a thousand years!