Euan Lawson
Purple skies and pink elephants
I do love talking about colour blindness. You can’t be in conversation with me too long before I’ll raise the topic and I suspect most of my work colleagues know about it. They are very generous about making accommodations when we are in presentations, or standard setting sessions, or just looking at documents. Yet, it’s also apparent some of them don’t necessarily understand it particularly well.
I have written a couple of articles on Blokeology: there’s one on late presenting bladder cancer° and another on colour blind cricketers.° And in Episode 053 I spoke to Kathryn Albany-Ward who runs the Colour Blind Awareness website.° Over the early months of 2020 I’m going to turn my attentions to a short book on colour blindness. As well as covering some of the basic science I’m going to touch on some of the interesting wrinkles around this common condition. With 8% of men affected it’s not that niche. It’s much less common in women — just 0.5% of them are affected — but we all know plenty of people who are colour blind. It is another matter whether they know it themselves of course. Doubtless I will discuss that.
At the moment I’m just planning a slim volume. I have an outline and it may come in with as little as 20-25,000 words but I may digress and it could be more like 35-40,000. That would be satisfying as it will feel more like a complete, if trim, book. So, that’s the aim and I’m getting my 2020 plan in early. I’ll post updates, and perhaps some excerpts, in due course. The working title is, as you might have guessed, Purple Skies and Pink Elephants, though that’s likely to change. It stems from my direct experience: it’s a standing joke that I refuse to accept the existence of the colour purple and pinks look very grey to me. I always thought elephants were pink. I was shocked to find out that’s not true.
The image is an example of an Ishihara plate. My daughter tells me that she can see the number 74. I can’t see anything, it’s just a blend of dots with no discernible pattern at all. She tells me the numbers are in green and the surrounding dots are varying shades of dark red and browns. I look at it and I’m not honestly sure I know what colour most of the dots are at all. I think I can tell some of the light greens with confidence but after that I’m stumped. They could be dark green, red, brown, orange… who knows?