London · Saturday March 17, 2007 by Lily
We had a very early start at 5.45 am with the dawn chorus accompanying us. It was a really good day. R did a fair amount of bus spotting in London with dh whilst I did a bit of window shopping and had a coffee sitting outside a French café, lovely. We went to the “Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year” exhibition at the Natural History Museum then raced to the Science Museum to see the IMAX film “Forces of Nature.”
I love going to galleries and art exhibitions, but R had a bad experience with art at school and it still remains with him. Inexplicably really, looking back, we didn’t realise he is colour-blind. He’d compensated with his own version of what shades of whatever he saw were, and applied our name to them. It was when he was hauled over the coals at school in year 2 for having purple sea in his picture that I took him to an optician. At first he was diagnosed as being so severely colour blind that he could only see shades of black, white and grey. This was later modified to red/green colour blindness, but he also can’t distinguish between dark and light shades, so dark brown, red, purple etc. are all very similar as are light pink, grey, turquoise etc. the only colours he can see clearly are blue and yellow. He loves yellow with a passion, says it sparkles. So he has a yellow lava lamp and so on.
Of course the implications of this are far wider than finding art appreciation tricky; he can’t easily follow his passions of Physics and Electronics, and working for the Railway (he’d be the third generation of railway employees.) What really rubs salt into the wound is that we can trace our family history back and over the last 150 years, no-one has been colour-blind, in fact we have ancestors who very definitely loved working with colour.
Anyway, although he wants nothing to do with art, I try to add a bit in here and there and do it with diversity, with sculpture, modern art, etc. One of our golden moments with HE was to stumble quite unexpectedly across Antony Gormley’s Field We were able to take the idea and reproduce it at our local HE group.
Those moments of unexpected discovery will stay with us forever.
We are off on our travels again tomorrow. We are going to see the Oxford Gang Show.
