it's not easy mixing green!

"it's not easy bein' green."
Kermit the frog

Today has been a day of trying to find my perfect green. It's my perfect greeney kind of turquoise. The colour I have in my head is the colour of the walls in this photo that I took roaming around the backstreets in Tunisia. I saw it again this week when I popped into see a friend and there budgie had escaped from the cage and was dive bombing all and sundry, that budgie too was my perfect colour. I also saw it as a young child when I helped to strip off about 300 layers of paint and wallpaper at my great grandparents house. It's a kind of aged greeney / turquoise colour.
So my dilemma, you know the advert, "we can mix any colour" just bring us a sample, so here in lies my problem. I am 2000 miles away from that building in Tunisia, the budgie is somewhere flying around Berkshire and my grandparents house probably has another 300 layers of stuff on the walls.
In search of my perfect colour started me thinking of this wonderful book I read Colour by Victoria Finlay. It's a treasure trove of a journey in the quest to uncover the secrets of the paintbox.
In the green chapter it tells of a secret colour that only royalty could own in China, which was found only on a very special kind of porcelain. Some examples were found in a hidden shrine in 1987 undisturbed since the ninth century.
The author talks with much excitement in having the opportunity to see some of the porcelain and see some of this mysterious secret green, only to find out it looked like a dirty olive brown. How disappointing!
I do like the idea of having a secret colour though.