WHEN your admission has been met with blank stares for decades, you eventually become convinced you're a freak. Finding that, in every 200 people, there's one like you is very comforting indeed.

It's thanks to Dr Vilayanur S Ramachandran (Rama for short) that I know I'm not a freak, but the one in 200 with synaesthesia.

It's not life-threatening, though there's no cure; it's not treatable with the most modern of drugs, but it's not hard to live with and I'd have to tell you I had it before you'd know.

For as long as I can remember, I've seen numbers in my mind in very specific colours. Forty is brick red, six a mid-blue and five a greyish-blue; eight is a sort of ochre and nine a dull red, and so on. That's one form of synaesthesia - some people "taste" numbers or even musical notes.

Rama, a neuroscientist with links with more universities than most of us could list off the top of our heads, explained it in the first of this year's Reith Lectures on Radio 4 last week.

The annual feeling that I ought to pay attention draws me to the Reith lectures; this year there was no sense of duty after the first few minutes. This was a rare being, a scientist with an A* in communicating with Everyman - and that was before he got on to coloured numbers.

Though I didn't agree with the colours seen by the patient he quoted, nor do I see figures in colour when they're written in black on a page, only in my mind, here was someone who didn't say: "Don't be stupid" (grownups to a small me) or "How ridiculous" (anyone to the adult me).

Rama also discounted the theory that seeing numbers in colour originated in a buried childhood memory of coloured fridge magnets. Quite right, my childhood didn't contain a fridge to stick them on to.

But it doesn't stop with colours, though Rama did.

When I see those coloured figures, they are in a particular pattern in relation to each other: an almost vertical column from 1-10, a gentle, left to right slope up through the teens to 20 then a zig-zag with only 30, 40 and so on visible at the ends of the zigs and zags. I once described that to a scientific boyfriend. He said bluntly: "You're innumerate." I didn't argue; I'd only squeaked GCE maths by a hair.

Nor is it confined to numbers. Months of the year are written in mental colour - August is lettered red, May yellow, and so on - and they appear on a sort of tilted, oval plane. There are vague background scenes for each month, which I can't quite make out, though they give the feeling of the season. But then, I can't draw or paint any more than I can do maths.

Synaesthesia seemed to run in families, said Rama. I've never dared mention it to the offspring, me being a bit off the wall in the maternal department at the best of times. But if it is hereditary and she has it, it'll put paid to the innumeracy taunt, her being a mathmo and all.

There are tens of thousands of D&S readers. Every 10,000 should, statistically, contain 50 people with synaesthesia (I think). What colour do they see (or taste) 50?