What colour is Wednesday?

If you are one of that small band of people who happen to see days of the week, months of the year, even single numbers and letters in colour, you are considered either very peculiar or very lucky. It also means you are a synaesthete. I am one of them.

Synaesthesia is a rare condition: few people have heard of it. To put it simply, synaesthesia is a psychological and neurological state concerning the visual and auditory areas of the brain. For those who have never known a yellow Friday, or a red July, it’s hard to understand how this curious phenomenon works. Most people have five senses: sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell. For synaesthetes, there is an overlapping of two or more senses. Aisthesis comes from the Greek word meaning sensation, while syn means together, or union. This mingling of the senses means a colour is produced in their minds. For some people it’s abstract things that conjure these colours — numbers, for example, or letters. In my own case it’s days of the week and months of the year. Those of us with this particular form of synaesthesia are considered more rare than those who only see numbers or letters. Rarer still are those to whom taste, smell and music produce colours.

My discovery of my own synaesthesia happened 40 years ago. I was talking to a literary man, a keen student of Nabokov. Somehow the conversation switched to the great writer’s ability to see letters in colour.

‘Well, I see days of the week in colour,’ I said. It wasn’t a boast. It was a fact.
‘That’s not possible!’ he shouted in furious disbelief. ‘Nabokov was a genius.’
‘It’s true,’ I said.