Domestic synaesthesia

For several years now, chilli con carne with a jacket potato has been a regular Thursday evening meal of ours. It’s within my extremely modest range of culinary capabilities, it’s tasty, and it permits me to experience – and thus to report on - a peculiar subjective phenomenon. At the stage in production where I shave a slice of butter from the butter dish and place it between the two halves of potato, I have an indefinable sense of Oxford. Not the city itself, or its colleges or even its name, but just a feeling of … Oxford. There’s nothing in our kitchen to cause such an association, apart from a jar of Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, hidden away in a cupboard. And no, I’ve never attempted anything as disgusting as jacket potato with marmalade. I doubt that even Paddington Bear has ever been that gross. It’s nothing to do with that, but purely an odd and presumably inappropriate mental link between a specific buttery manoeuvre and the concept of Oxford.

As you probably fear, that isn’t the end of the matter. In a drawer close to where the butter dish resides is the key to our garden shed. This, in analogous fashion, causes me to think, not of Oxford, but of Hull. It’s a simple lever-type key, and I have wondered if its teeth spell out an art deco version of the word HULL, but I’ve checked and, no, they don’t. Another explanation is called for. Perhaps it’s because the shed is a bit out of the way and in the top right corner of the garden. Certainly there’s no way one could mistake our shed for a city of culture, or even an ex-one.  

Upstairs, in the bathroom, are my interdental toothbrushes, made by TePe of Malmö. I would like to say that they are specially made for me and flown in by courier every morning, but the truth is that my dentist keeps them in a big box in reception. They’re in two sizes, one yellow, one blue, representing – IKEA-like - the colours of the Swedish flag. The yellow brushes I think of as the Swedish brushes, which is odd though slightly sensible. The blue ones as … the Russian ones, with slight hints of “ruthenium”, the chemical element named after an old Latin word which coincidentally is also the root of the word “Russia”.

Thus I slide down a Pyeongchang-sized slippery slope towards madness. One comfort is that I’m not alone, and that someone who has always been very sane, and often very amusing, has been known to experience something similar, though more related to feelings of personality than to inappropriate intrusions of language. Playwright and national treasure Alan Bennett, on page 284 of his volume of diary entries called “Untold Stories”, recounts that on 8th January 2001 he noticed “how personalised and peopled the material world is at a level almost beneath scrutiny”. The “material world” in question was the contents of his cutlery drawer, which included some “friendly” wooden spoons, while others were “impersonal or without character”. There was “a friendly fork” and “a bad knife”. He acknowledged that setting down these observations in this way seemed close to insanity but that “it goes back to childhood when the entire household was populated with friends and not-friends and few objects were altogether inanimate, particularly knives and forks”. He concluded that, despite sixty years having passed and his kitchen having relocated from Leeds to Camden Town, “more traces of this animistic world persist” than he would like, “making a mockery of reason and sense”.

This is reassuring, because as well as the feelings about the butter, the shed key and the toothbrushes, I also have some peculiar feelings about items of cutlery, in particular half a dozen bone handled knives I inherited from my Welsh grandmother. Some of these have rectangular cross-sectioned handles, and others have handles with a curved profile. I avoid using the curved ones. I’m not sure what would happen if I did use them.

This isn’t madness - although just don’t get me started on spoons. It isn’t a phobia or a superstition as such, it isn’t even obsessive compulsive neurosis. It’s very slightly autistic, I suspect, with a large helping of our good friend the pathetic fallacy too, but mostly, I think, it’s a mild variety of synaesthesia. Neuroscientist Vilanayur Ramachandran, based at the University of California at San Diego, has commented that there is now virtually a synaesthesia industry. So be it, and  perhaps there should be. People who exhibit coloured hearing, “see” Tuesday as pink or the number 4 as blue, experience Tottenham Court Road station as sausage and eggs, or exhibit other explicit forms of sensory blending or crossover or mix-up, have become popular media fodder in recent years. I don’t enjoy anything as spectacular as that myself, although sometimes when listening to music I spontaneously generate geometric patterns or architectural fantasies in my mind’s eye. I do, however, believe that my ruminations around the house, and likewise those of Alan Bennett, as described above, are very much in the same territory as more blatant forms of synaesthesia.

 
Moreover, on the basis of absolutely no reliable evidence, I believe that, to a degree, we’re all synaesthetic, at least some of the time. While we use superficially synaesthetic metaphors constantly in everyday language – loud shirts, cool responses, heated arguments, pointed remarks, feeling down, sharp disagreements, real heavy man – and while in a small percentage of people synaesthesia takes its newsworthy forms, I suspect something more basic and pervasive, and that synaesthesia plays a fundamental role in the way we think.