Recently, I went on an adventure to an alien and intimidating place, a real no-go area: Belgravia’s interiors shops. My best friend is trying to buy a flat and to energise her for this grim journey of owner ghostings, asbestos, incompetent agents and outrageous prices, she needed a bit of escapist fun looking at chi-chi paints.
Unfortunately, she brought me: a person with all the visual sensibility of a house brick (Terre D’Egypte? Porphyry Red?). I sat vacant and unhelpful as she discussed nuances of verdigris and celadon, interjecting when something obvious struck me. “That one is yellow!” I would say, with toddler-like delight; or, “I like that.” Mostly I looked at colour charts.
One brand’s paint names, I decided, mainly fell into two name categories: posh girl or posh girl’s pony. We had lots of fun working these out. Jonquil, Evie, Pomona, Clove, Tawny, Brick and Buff: girls (the last two surely boarding school nicknames). Pippin, Gladstone, Teddy, Tyrian and Pompadour: ponies. I hope the paint people wouldn’t mind this impertinence; after all, they came up with Cuisse de Nymphe Emue, which translates as “overcome nymph’s thigh” (it’s a subtle, blushing pink). You can’t call a paint that without your tongue (Red Ochre?) at least slightly in your cheek (Nicaragua?).
It’s endlessly mocked and parodied (most recently in a mobile phone ad: “Anaemic Moon? Scrubbed Cauliflower?”), but is any creative endeavour more challenging than naming paints? I used to write alluring descriptions of nondescript chain hotel rooms and that barely reaches the foothills of invention compared with a paint chart. How do they do it? I read up on the philosophy behind Farrow & Ball’s Elephant’s Breath (already fashionable in the 1870s, apparently) and how a paint was named Harajuku Morning (holiday memories and a playlist), but I’m none the wiser. The name choices never feel wrong to me, either: I often look at a baby and think, “No, you’re definitely not an Oscar”; I’ve never felt that about, say, a brown swatch of paint called Wainscot. These people are geniuses. Forget the Booker – there should be a prize for paint naming.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
