26 March: Purple Day

Today is Purple Day, so here are 10 facts about the colour purple.

1. Purple is a secondary colour made by mixing Red and Blue. Its complementary colour is Yellow. It's not the same as violet - violet is a colour in its own right, at the end of the spectrum.
2. The word purple has been in use in the English language since 975AD. The word ultimately derives from a Greek word for a purple dye they used to make from mucus secreted by spiny dye-murex snail. This was called Tyrian dye and is mentioned in the Iliad. Unfortunately it can't be said that no snails were harmed in the process - thousands of them had to be removed from their shells and soaked before their mucus glands were removed and the juice removed. Left in sunlight the juice would change colour several times - White, yellow, Green, violet, red and finally purple. People making it had to know the right time to stop the process to get the colour they wanted.
3. Needless to say, this was expensive stuff, which is one reason why it has been associated with royalty and high-ranking offices. Alexander the Great was one king who wore clothes dyed with Tyrian purple. Charlemange was another - his coronation robe was made of material dyed in the stuff.
4. In the Bible, purple was one of the colours of cloth from which God decreed that curtains of the Tabernacle be made. In the New Testament, Jesus was dressed in purple in the hours before His death as part of the Roman soldiers' mockery of his claim to be King of the Jews.
5. In mythology, purple gets a few mentions. It was the colour Ajax's belt, the sheets on Odysseus's bed on his wedding night, and purple dye is used on the tails of the horses of Trojan warriors. The poet Sappho waxes lyrical about purple footwear made by dyers in the Greek kingdom of Lydia.
6. In China purple dye was made from a plant called purple gromwell, but it didn't stick to fabric very well so it was still an expensive colour to produce and still limited to royalty and rich people. Later on in China it represented impropriety.
7. It was the 19th century before purple dyes became accessible to common people, as a result of an experiment that went slightly wrong. In 1856 a young man named William Henry Perkin was trying to make a synthetic cure for malaria, but made a dye instead. The shade of it was called mauveine, which is where the word "mauve" comes from. Perkins developed an industrial process to produce the dye so that many more people could afford it.
8. The Jimi Hendrix song Purple Haze gets its name from a slang term for the state of mind people get when they are high on psychedelic drugs. It has also given its name to a strain of cannabis, which has purple buds. Purple appears in a few other song titles - Purple Rain, Deep Purple (also a band) and Purple People Eater, to name but a few.
9. Does anything rhyme with purple? There are a couple of rhyming words although they're both quite obscure. One is "curple", a Scottish word for a horse's rump or a part of a saddle, and "hirple" a word of Norse origin meaning to limp.
10. Only two national flags contain the colour purple and neither of these feature it as a major colour. Dominica's flag features a purple parrot and Nicaragua's flag features a Rainbow.

My Books 

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The Ultraheroes series

Several new groups of superheroes, mostly British, living and working (mostly) in British cities like London and Birmingham. People discovering they have, and learning to live with, superpowers. Each book is complete in itself although there is some overlap of characters.

The Raiders series

A tale of two dimensions, and worm hole travel between the two. People displaced in both time and space, learning to get along and work together to find a way home while getting used to the superpowers wormhole travel gave them. A trilogy.

Golden Thread

A superhero tale with a difference. Five heroes from another dimension keep returning - whenever they return, they have a job to do and are a well-meshed team in order to do it. Until one time, something goes wrong...

Tabitha Drake series

A different kind of power - the ability to talk to dead people. Tabitha has it, and murder victims seek her out to make sure justice is done. Tabitha has this and a disastrous love life to cope with.

Short story collections

Some feature characters from the above novels, others don't. They're not all about superheroes. Some are creepy, romantic, funny.