Pink and blue hair, sparkly unicorn shoes, a bracelet with all sort of mermaidy pieces on her right wrist, the lady standing outside the train station suddenly caught my eye. This is the mermaid I’m going to talk to, I believe.

Carla kindly offered to pick me up at the train station and we had a nice chat on the way to her studio. The first ever mermaid in Colchester, Carla and I agreed with this title. She was going to try the new route she explored on the way to the train station. Oops, we went to the wrong road in the end and got lost. So I had my very exclusive experience having a Colchester tour with a mermaid.

After about 20 minutes’ drive, we have finally arrived at her studio – a very artistic building with lots of painting and artworks in it. Following Carla going through the long corridor, she stopped in front of a white door. Two pictures hanging on the wall outside, that was her cats – lying comfortably on a sofa.

She took the keys out and this is where the magic happens. “Blue is my favourite colour,” she said. The whole room is decorated in all different sorts of blue, the chair, pictures on the wall and her mermaid tail, of course.

The time is counting down, the clock is ticking, it is the time for her to turn to a mermaid.

Her sophisticated beautiful bluey mermaid tail – it is probably not the easiest thing to put on, and it is very hard for her to move around in her tail. Now I know, mermaids really can’t walk, they need legs. For the first time, the Disney fairy tale didn’t lie to me, surprisingly.

“I need to put my mermaid makeup on before the interview,” she said. So I witnessed the arts of how to create a mermaidy look. “Can you get my fishnet from that trolley please?” she asked. I had absolutely no idea what’s she’s going to do with it.  

The next thing she did shock me, she put it on her head!

“It’s always interesting to explain it to people when they look at you doing that. If you are trying to get ready at an event, and walking out, like a toilet, with this on your head, yeah, it’s fun.” She made me laugh.

Then I get the purpose of doing it after she started putting rainbow highlighter all over her face. It is the thing giving you this incredible glow scale on your face – if you are a mermaid, of course, you need it. Sadly, it didn’t work out very well this time, as she used a cotton pad instead of a brush because it took us ages trying to find out a brush, but we just couldn’t find it.   

A beautiful mermaid sitting in front of me, it’s the time to tell her story.

About six or seven years ago, Carla was working in a city, she described her job as boring. One day, at lunchtime, she was just browsing the internet, then a video of Hannah mermaid – one of the world’s first professional mermaids suddenly came up. It was a video about Hannah swimming with underwater creatures.

“I just thought oh my god, I need to do it, I have to try it!” She said.

It took her another few years to do it, as, at the time, it was very difficult to get a tail in the UK.

“To be fair, I actually didn’t realise it was a thing. But the way I try to operate in my life is that if I haven’t seen it to be proved to be impossible, then I have to give it a go.”

Carla has always wanted to be a mermaid since she was a child.

“I went to the beach with my dad’s family and sat on a rock with my legs slightly tucked to one side. I was like, I’m a mermaid mommy, I’m a mermaid! Yes, but you are actually not a mermaid. So apparently this was coming from a long time.

“But eventually what happened was in late 2015, I found the funds and courage, I shipped the tail in. And I got in and I swim in it!”