A night on the tiles: Rainbow orange…

The beautiful rainbow-orange tiled wall of the ladies’ loos in the Kuku Club…

I don’t get out much, but the other night I went to someone’s retirement party at the Kuku Club in the Park Plaza Hotel in Cardiff.

It was a pleasant evening, but my abiding memory is of the ladies’ loos! The walls and floor were covered in small iridescent orange tiles and I could have stared at them forever, going oooooooh… So I took a picture of them with my iPhone.

The loos were funny anyway, as you had to wrestle with a heavy rope curtain to get there. The theme of the bar seems to be Moroccan and there are lots of copper-topped tables and ornate lighting.

But back to the rainbow orange. It reminded me of a small ceramic cup and saucer I bought in an Athens department store three or four decades ago, when I was a student.

My souvenir cup and saucer from Greece…

I had bought the set because I had seen the same crockery in use all over Greece, so it was a souvenir of the holiday. But only now do I realise the ware is actually made in the USA! The brand is Fire King, made by Anchor Hocking, and it’s a bit like Pyrex. So that means it’s opaque and lustrous glass, rather than china.

If I look very closely at the underside of the cup and saucer, I can see the words Fire King and made in the USA…

It’s usually called peach lusterware and here are lots of images of the stuff.

I still think of it as orange, but I can see why people call it peach.

I also did some Googling on the theme “rainbow orange” (as you do) and found this colourful recipe for rainbow gelatin orange wedges…

Rainbow gelatin orange wedges from Quick Dish…

OK, ramblings over – I just wanted to share the picture of the lovely tiles, really…