Anne has known many wallpapers in her time. For her the first and best was that which covered her bedroom walls at home which was blue flowers on white. She remembers the shapes of the flowers; "There's one like a witch's face over by the mantelpiece and there she is again up by the light switch, there she is again by the skirting board...she looks like a lupin but she's only pretending....and when you look away from her you'll always find her someplace else".
Researching wallpaper has lead Anne to one big conclusion that whenever you enter a room " the wallpaper is always, but always orange. That most morbid and irritating of colours...with it's acid colour and unnatural splendour...orange is a strangely flat colour and very inedible. It's the blind colour of optimism and airport furniture.
Anne had one experience of orange wallpaper while staying in a bed sit in France. "it was on the ceiling. Flowers as big as your face, spawning their psychotic symmetry over everything that was flat and much that wasn't. I expected to wake up one morning and find it had crept over the furniture, across the floor, up the cooker, around the cornflakes box!"
The flowers on wallpaper puzzle Anne: "What are they, are they marigolds, crossed with Tudor roses with some kind of sunflower overtones." It seems that the kind of flowers used indicate the decade they were made in: "think of the early fifties, those sweet forget-me-knots, surrounded by doodles of amoebas and wave ships. Then there's early sixties which just means big flowers out of Twiggy's hat. But when did the metallic highlights come in and those Tyrolean mountain scenes?"
Anne's work as a novelist came under one critic's scalpel who said they didn't know what kind of wallpaper Anne's characters had,"they have have wallpaper that would have killed Oscar Wilde quicker" was her curt reply.
