50 Shades of White

Yes, you read that correctly. I used "50 Shades of..." in the title of this post.

Don't worry, I'm fully aware of the douchery of that.

Anyway, during my handover period with the lady whose maternity leave I'm covering, conversation turned to colours of horses.

During this conversation, I was advised that white horses are called grey.

This makes no sense.

"Hi. I'm clearly grey. And I have a gentle glow around me. I should probably have wings."

A few photos of horses later, and we happened upon a horse that looked like this one.

"You will not BELIEVE what colour horse I am!"

Obviously I had to ask: "So what you call one of these? Would you say it's brown and white, or brown and grey?"

"No, these are called skewbalds."

Because of course they are. Because that's a word.

It reminded me a bit of guitars and the silly names manufacturers give to colours of guitars.

For example, here is my Fender American Standard Stratocaster signed by Dave Hill from Slade. You're probably thinking "Wow, it's a lovely cream colour!"

Used for playing barre chords on choruses with the middle pickup through a Smokey amp with the volume rolled down to seven or eight.

Hah! Any Fender catalogue will tell you that this is in fact Arctic White, despite it clearly not being white at all!

But it's not just Fender. No way José! If you put on your imagination eyes to see past the terribleness of the photograph (remember Blackberries?), you might see a black Epiphone Supernova.

Sitting at home in Castlebar in a case :-(

Except you don't. That's "ebony". The catalogue said.

See what I mean? Horse colours and guitar colours are practically the same.

Anyway, after a few hours reflecting on the matter, it occurred to me: "What about all the pubs called The White Horse!? Are they just wrong now!?"

Apparently so.

Google returns 25,500,000 results for "the white horse pub" and they're all just meaningless, whilst a search for "the grey horse" only returns 1,790,000 results.

I did think about this fact a lot, but it was nowhere nearing as crushing or life-changing as the next piece of information I would learn about horses. Not by a long shot...