It's All White

I have bifurcated my Substack (this sounds painful). If you subscribe, you may already be aware of this. I wanted to create a newsletter that had all my arty musings on it that was separate to this one, but which I could manage from the same account. I had hoped I had done that, but it appears that all you who are here for my musings about scrotums are now being bombarded by my artistic ponderings as well.

I can only apologise for my technological incompetence and urge you to unsubscribe if you can’t cope with the deluge of writing that is coming your way, until I find someone who can help me change it. I have tried, but I smacked up hard against my Luddite tendencies when I considered burning everything down, so I have stepped away from tinkering for a while.

I don’t need you to tell me if you’re unsubscribing. I don’t need you to tell me anything, actually. That sounds churlish. If you want to comment, great. I love a chat, as anyone who has ever been in earshot of me will testify. However, I write for myself, so if you hate it, or me, or any combination thereof, please feel free to leave quietly. I am definitely not for everyone, but I am completely for myself.

I wrote a post on the other arm of my Substack about Riccardo Falcinelli’s book Chromorama, which is a hefty tome about colour theory. One of the chapters I didn’t discuss over there was about the colour white and its connection with the idea of purity and cleanliness, but also wealth and taste.

Some of the stuff he writes, about how we have an erroneous idea about white from classical antiquity is absolutely fascinating. He points out that when they were made, classical statues would have been highly coloured and decorated, and it is only over time and the circumstances in which they were rediscovered, that they have become white - and that whiteness has been elevated into something desirable.

He talks about how the situation has completely switched over time because of technology. The industrial revolution was the turning point at which colours that had previously been impossible to make in quantity suddenly became reproducible and stable, thus making them available to the masses. It meant that colour lost its value and rarity and suddenly white, minimalism became the sign of wealth and taste.

Or in my case, panic and frenzy.

I can say hand on heart that I aspire to minimalism, but have the heart of a hoarder and the acquisitive tendencies of a magpie. I am also a filthy beast. This is not an allusion to my last post, it is a statement of fact about my inability to remain clean for less than twenty minutes on any given day. Anything white with clean lines and a pleasing aesthetic will, in my grubby mitts, become a palace of filth in which I reign supreme in a matter of moments.

I used to blame this on my children.

Once, when Tilly was a smol bean, we were invited en famille, to the house of a couple we were great friends with. They had recently finished doing up a gorgeous, Georgian house and wanted to show it off.

What seems obvious now, and quite rapidly became apparent then, was that we had failed to take into account that we had a small child, who by that time was capable of independent movement, and that they did not - and that changed everything.

What in previous times would have been the perfect Sunday, with a leisurely lunch that was prepared on the hoof, with coffee brewing, wine on tap, light chit-chat and the newspapers to browse through, was now fraught with peril.

Firstly, their entire house was a death trap for the ambulant toddler, which required me to sprint about, saving her from plummeting to her death down admittedly very gorgeous stairwells and any number of other, interesting ways to die.

Secondly, they had very much gone for a Japanese style of furnishing which meant that everything was at toddler level. Cue me piling tea lights, bibelots, artworks and costly coffee table books in drifts on any and all surfaces higher than my knee to a chorus of; ‘no, no, it’s fine, that wasn’t very expensive at all,’ from our increasingly tense hosts.

Thirdly, and to my mind very much worstly, they had decided to go for a completely minimalist decor and painted every inch of the house in blinding white paint. It was some kind of fancy, eco paint which dried to a chalky finish which, we now found, was really good at coming off all over anything you brushed up against it, mainly small girls.

Lunch was an extremely long time coming, which was absolutely fine if you were a grown up and you understood that it would come eventually. It was not fine if you had no concept of time, your normal lunch time was a fair while ago and you were pretty sure you were going to die of starvation.

Things were getting increasingly tense. All the distractions we had bought with us had proved to be worse than useless and all the things she wanted to play with were now piled ten deep on top of the fridge. All that was left was allowing her to roam in the room with the least dangerous things in it, so we let her loose in the dining room which apart from the table and chairs which were, thank God, at normal height, had nothing else in it for her to harm or be harmed by.

It was just a clean, white room.

Just a clean, white room with a bloody big fireplace in it that none of us thought about because it was just a hole in the wall and who the hell wants to play with a hole in the wall?

A distressed, starving, bored child. That’s who wants to play with a hole in the wall. A lovely, sooty, hole in the wall. Which, it turns out is exactly perfect for a nearly two-year-old to climb into and up. She had to be dragged protestingly out, whereupon she wriggled free and discovered to her delight that you could make wonderfully black hand prints on a pristine white wall before anyone could catch you. It turns out that white bathrooms are also quite susceptible to sooty ministrations.

The friendship didn’t last long after that.

And as for white, well, it still gives me the fear and is definitely something for the wealthy, not because it’s expensive to buy things in white, it’s because bitter experience shows that it’s expensive to keep things white. At least it is in this house.