Everyone in the world woke up seeing a brand new colour. It’s changing lives, mostly for the worse. Your job is naming the colour.

You’ve noticed over the course of your career that people usually describe colours on their own mix-and-match interpretation of the spectrum: it’s a purpley brown or it’s definitely green but with a bit of a limey-yellow sort of tinge. But this development has thrown everyone, even the experts.

You glance down the length of the board table and slowly complete the audit with your eyes…yes, finally everyone invited has taken their assigned seat. You’ve got the Government reps – distinctive in their cheap, out of date suits and greyish pallor. The Pantone contingent are much more colourfully robed with the odd hipster glasses and beard combo to maintain their position as the creative voices. They’ve brought a nerdy type too who keeps shuffling through his swatch books, pausing, before shaking his head and letting his fingers keep dancing over the leaves. I agree with his silent verdict, I couldn’t match it either.

Also present are two IP lawyers (intense), three physicists (two confused, one angry), a mixologist (flighty) and a motherly looking frazzled 40 something who won a radio phone in comp in order to be here today.

Naming a brand new colour is a big deal. I mean paint companies claim to do it all the time, but really they are naming new shades – Jasper is a beigey green grey and Storm is a blueish purple with deep green layers too. This new colour, current code name: tomb, is just unlike anything seen before.

It’s not a shade, a tone, a tint or a mix. It’s just other.

We can’t work out its CMYK/RGB breakdown. We don’t really have the vocab we need to describe it but name it we must.

I remind myself that what we decide here today will be big news, it will go down in history.

“Thank you all for coming” I start as silence falls over the room and all eyes focus on me and the mic I hold, “I’d like to open the floor for discussion”.

No one expects the first words will come from the colour itself as it rises slowly from the box in front of me… “I am called Lorraine” it states confidently before sinking back into the box.