Tomato, rose, cherry, fire engine, ruby, chilli pepper, blood, crimson, strawberry, coral, poppy, cardinal, brick, raspberry, flame, carmine, rust, scarlet, burgundy, vermillion, persimmon, maroon. The colour red can mean so many different things: stop, warning, courage, danger, love, lust, hot… Communism, Indian weddings and Chinese New Year…. Anger, passion, sin, good luck…
Old red stamps: cherries and ping pong; Christmas prayers and Communist workers; a dragon, a lion, a horse and an ox.
Red toy vehicles from our childhood: Toy trains powered by steam, electricity and small hands; a double decker London bus with most of its paint worn off; a digger, with dirt still in its caterpillar treads; and a battered, repainted truck.
Origami paper, a Chinese paper cut, vintage kimono badges and a geisha coaster.
Games pieces: Various counters and dice, a Rummy number 7, a Mastermind peg, a tiddlywinks wink, a carrom puck, a battleship and a biplane.
Red heads. Royalty, politics and history.
Vintage buttons, a crochet hook, a 1950s (or maybe ’80s?) buckle, and a spool of thread.
A handmade book from Udaipur, Rajasthan which my mother kept as a diary in 1990 during the 8 months my family and I spent in India; an old book about the artist Albrecht Dürer, a small Japanese notebook covered in washi paper, coloured pencils and a letter A.
Red odds and ends: a ball of cotton; a plastic bangle that looks like carved coral at a glance; an old pendant made from coins and beads that my father picked up in Morocco in the early ’70s; a small German glass jar with roses painted on its lid and old glass buttons inside; a vintage brooch bought at Spitalfields market in London; a paper mache toadstool and a vintage buckle.
