Hello Dolly

Carol O’Callaghan says there is a latent Dolly Mixture lover lying dormant inside us waiting to escape

Didn’t we simply adore them in childhood? Remember the sight of those pretty little morsels in all our favourite colours, trapped in cellophane bags just waiting to be ripped open before a nimble fingered forage for the pink one that tasted of saccharine heaven.

Funny how the memory in adulthood of that sugar shot can bring on a slight ripple of nausea, thanks to our more developed and, we’d like to think, sophisticated palates.

But is there a latent Dolly Mixture lover lying dormant inside us waiting for something to trigger the longing and send us spiralling into relapse? Sometimes those behaviours from our early years we thought we had mastered haven’t really been mastered at all, we’ve just transferred them onto other things.

Take a look around your home and see the influences from those early years impacting on your interior life. Have you indulged your childhood wish to have a bedroom painted in a particular colour? Or is it a minor act of middle-aged rebellion that makes you go your own way without any reference to your parents and their decorating taste, which you relive at the sight of paint labels that take you back to the conservative tastes of that generation? Mine is a very special loathing of Magnolia and Mushroom paints so beloved of house-proud mammies in the ’80s.

They weren’t exactly colours as much as shades of clean dreariness supported by carpets and cushions in variations of brown, and its close relations coffee and tan, all in the name of being serviceable of course. My personal and tragically tame act of rebellion is pink and white and blue and white striped fitted sheets, but the embedding of white-only linens on my childhood psyche means I can’t give up on gleaming white flat sheets and pillowcases. Of course the stripes mean the wrinkles don’t show up as much as they do on plain white or plain colours which is a perfect arrangement, as being my mother’s daughter it’s a lesser spotted iron you’ll see in my hand.

In the relentless pursuit of the latest trend to wax about at length, can I tempt you to the grown up world of Dolly Mixtures, to apply to your interiors those sweetie versions of pink, green, yellow, blue and mauve that go by the sophisticated name of pastels? Consider the application of some of this prettiness to a single wall, or embark on a Sunday morning painting project and liven up the seat of a chair. But if Sunday morning is for lazing about and dreaming, form a thought around a pink sofa to replace that shabby leather thing you bought for practicality. Try too the easy to implement and highly affordable yellow bedecked cushion as a nod to the gorgeous yellow of spring Forsythia shrubs we see leaning over garden walls to catch our eye.

Then again if you have the rebellious notion of not being told what to do, and are sticking with white minimalism or deeply serious heritage colours, get a fix of the trend with a whole box of those in-vogue confections, the pastel coloured macaroon. Rip open the box, grab the pink one and you’re in pastel saccharine heaven again.

* Next week we go in search of funky furniture