Do you "suffer" from synesthesia?

After my comment on Colour Taste and Cover Versions, (7th Sep)about the taste of paint box colours, a friend of mine wondered if I was a synasthetic. This has nothing to do with appreciating the beauty of certain sins (lovely as some of them are) but is the stimulation of one sense by another.

Having established that I am a synesthete, the question then followed how badly synesthetic was I?

Not as badly as my mum and aunt, it would seem. They're identical twins (supposedly) and they see different colours for each letter of the alphabet. Some letters have the same colour but others are completely different. I can't do this.

But I would like to be able to. And I don't think of myself as suffering from my senses prodding each other into noticing things.

People suffer from abnormalities, ergo synesthesia must be something we suffer from. But we don't consider artists or musicians from suffering from genius. We envy them even if they are tortured souls who can't see their own genius. I wonder colour it would be if they could?

Somebody once told me that creativity is a series of leakages. Artists make startling new observations that open the eyes of others - like Picasso substituting horns for handlebars on a bike.

Far from suffering from it I enjoy my synesthesia. In fact we are all synesthetic. For example, if you had two creatures, one called a Bodoober and the other a Skaksilon, which one is round and soft and the other a bit spiky?

We respond to sensory stimuli in so many different ways. Every body makes different associations with art or music.

Taking my mum and aunt as examples, if you connected their brains to each others nervous systems they might see red as blue and associate heat with the colour blue. It would be a pretty grisly experiment and I think the three of us prefer things as they are.

But what interests me as a writer is the connections different words can provoke in different people. How about this series of words.

"In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long the Men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale..."

Some of you will recognise this as the introduction to Noggin the Nog. Even if you don't I bet you've snuggled down for a story. You might even be conjuring up images of the Black Rocks and the great halls where the people have come to gather around their log fires.

That's the sort of mass connection I'd like to get across. The ultimate would be to get across to my readers the feelings I get when I look upon something, be it a car, bike, a landscape or a person. I like my synesthesia and leaky connections so much I want to share them with you.