I Wanted a Yellow Bedroom

Rice crisps and a banana

When asked what colour I wanted my bedroom to be painted when I was 6 or so, I said pink: not because that was the colour I wanted, but because it's what I thought I was expected to answer. My little sister, the bolder, bumptious one of us was the archetypal tomboy -- short hair, and a violent aversion to skirts. I felt a responsibility to offer the counterpoint to that. If she was the tomboy, then I had to be the girly girl.

I wasn't terribly good at it. For starters I was far too messy -- my bedroom this clutter generating organism -- it remains so even to this day; my hair always flying out of its plait, a halo of fluffy curls obscuring my vision; my socks constantly slumping about my ankles; my knees permanently skinned.

It wasn't that I disliked dresses, or dolls, or pink even. It was just that I liked climbing trees, and building dams and yellow just as much.

When asked what colour I wanted my room to be, I thought yellow, but answered pink.

My bedroom now is yellow (aggressively, birds custardly so); my sister wears a lot of pink, which puts her firmly with the zeitgeist (t'was ever thus!).