Born on a blue day

I was leaning out of my window once, smoking a cigarette with an old friend, around 1996 or so. Jay was the sort of bloke who knew everything about everything. The conversation somehow turned to the development of language and the alphabet, and I wondered aloud why it was that letters and numbers had certain colours which were never really acknowledged in the 'real world', and in fact were represented incorrectly most of the time. I wasn't sure whether or not this was a daft thing to say, nor whether it made any sense, but Jay seemed interested and probed me more on the subject.

"That's called synaesthesia" he said, finally.

I didn't have the internet in those days, so I had to take his word for it. However, I soon realised that not everyone had colours for letters, or shapes, tastes and textures for sounds, or that the days of the week had different 'personalities'. Just me then. Through a later conversation about it with a friend, he discovered that not everyone thinks and dreams in black and white as he does. Revelations all round.

So having found out all I could about synaesthesia and learning that we don't all follow the same pattern but do have other traits in common (difficulty with numbers being my favourite one - I had always been frustratingly bad at maths but never knew why), I suddenly felt all unique and special and I wanted to tell people about it.

The first person I remember telling was my dad, who had struggled with me for many years on the maths thing - he himself was a bit of a maths boffin so couldn't understand why my grasp of it was so weak. He appeared to be listening, but then may as well have said "that's nice dear" for all he actually was. I stopped talking, and was left feeling like a bit of a tit. Every time I've tried to talk about it since then it's been pretty much the same. People basically think I'm bonkers, making it up, talking rubbish, or just aren't that interested. I am used to keeping things to myself though - not least because the words I want to say are not the same words I need to use to be understood.

But it doesn't stop me thinking it's a fantastic thing, or researching it, or even sometimes using it to my (I like to think) advantage. Once, I went for a job interview and decided to wear the colour of the name of the company. I felt comfortable, like I fitted in, and it was the best interview I ever gave - I got the job. I've successfully repeated this tactic since. I get annoyed when I see advertisements and companies using the 'wrong' colours on their logos or fonts. But it makes me so happy to see a 'right' one. Channel4 have been getting it right since day one. I love how the W of Wednesday is the pivot on which the rest of the week rests like a see-saw, and how Tuesday and Thursday either side of it are paler shades of its own colour. I like how my boyfriend's first name is the same as the strip of his football team. I could tell everyone which team they should support based on the colour of their name (which would mean Everton or Leicester for me, hmm).

Music is another thing entirely. Voices conjure glass or stones or water, instruments can bring sparkly lights against darkness, or metallic forms, or things shattering, or even a sort of trajectory through empty space, like it's the only thing that exists. The sound of a flute brings sweet-tasting pastel coloured puffs of air. Some music fills every available space like smoke in a room. Trying to learn songs that other people have written is a challenge though, as I find myself wanting to do the 'right' thing, and having to train myself to do as the writer intended. I like this challenge though, and when a song all pulls together the wrongs sort of right themselves and it takes on a new form. Writing songs is easy until I try and involve other musicians and find I can't explain in musical terms what it is I want them to do.

I think a lot of TV food critics might be synesthetes from the way they often describe flavours.

All this that I now know and acknowledge, I took completely for granted until my friend first mentioned synaesthesia. I'm more aware of it all going on now and love looking at the art of synesthetes like Kandinsky and David Hockney and thinking about where they might have been coming from. I would find it immensely hard to put these things into art or music so I admire these artists above all others.

Sometimes it seems strange to me that nobody knows, or that nobody ever celebrates it, or that people like me are reluctant to because it seems so daft. But if everyone thinks like me then how do synesthetes find each other?

I'm one, are you?