YEAR END RAMBLINGS
On Christmas Eve a colleague asked me - for no apparent reason - what my favourite colour was. Almost without having to think about it, I told her it was purple. A few moments later, I remembered that a listener I was chatting to on the Big Blue Bus a few years ago had asked me the same question and that my reply then was ‘grey’. At the time, needless to say, I was roundly lampooned. The Bus visitor was a firm believer in the theory that there is some exotic chromatic significance to all our personalities and that ‘grey people’ were predictably dull, unimaginative, uninspiring and indecisive. It didn’t seem to occur to her that grey is - simply put - as pleasant a colour as any other or that it could have very positive associations. It is the colour our hair turns when we become older, wiser people who have the time to stand, stare and consider the world and the place we have carved for ourselves in it. Grey is adaptable; it sits comfortably with brash reds, greens and blues as well as more sedate black and white. Its name is attached to the tastiest tea in the universe and, for Novocastrians, it has echoes of Grey Street and Grey’s Monument. Altogether a very pleasant colour indeed.
So why the change to purple? There you have me. It is, of course, the colour of the Roman Emperors, of the velvet lining of Imperial crowns and of the Order of the Garter. Its associations are with power, royalty, wealth and good breeding - none of which seems relevant to an underpaid BBC drudge kept chained up in the Senior Editor’s wine cellar under the Pink Palace and released only to keep insomniacs and shift-workers amused during the hours of darkness.
Perhaps all I’ve done in the move from grey to purple is to exercise the right of any individual - a right too often regarded as a sign of being ‘grey’, weak and indecisive. I’ve simply changed my mind. What’s wrong with that?