Maybe it's the rainbow party preps, but driving along on my way to the train station, it suddenly struck me how grey, silver, black, white and bleak the road has become.
Growing up we had a bright yellow Mitsubishi van with lurid green carpet (and my parents wondered why I was constantly car sick). Parked behind it in the driveway was a bright yellow Datsun 120Y that my mother pretended to drive*. We grew up across the road from a bowling club and Friday nights would see a procession of orange, purple, yellow, red and green cars all lined up waiting for their owners to down 8 schooners and then drive them home.
It got me thinking.
It's not just cars. Everything is really, really dull these days. It's rare the cat who decides to give his own fashion style a whirl. Everyone just dresses the way the magazines tell us to and that's sadly in shades of taupe, camel and chocolate - with a hint of grey. Our houses are nicely decorated with colourful cushions popping nicely on a neutral sofa because that's what all the houses look like in house-porn magazines so that's the look we are supposed to like.
Even people are less likely to want to say something that might make them pop against the dull-beige of political correctness. Being a 'character' isn't so much a badge of honour these days as a badge of courage. Bland, grey people who rote-learn their opinions off the evening news and look vaguely perplexed when you ask them what they like doing.
So worried are we that our children won't 'fit in' with these boring people that we stifle their enthusiasm for anything we don't think is 'normal' and encourage them into towing the line to getgoodgradesandmakesomethingofthemselves. We watch their amazing creative spirits and the passion they have for the most bizarre things and secretly hope they'll develop the same passion for economics or tossing so they can become a rich investment banker. Heaven help them if they want to be a juggler or an artist or a nurse. There's no money in that. How will they ever be able to afford their grey car and grey life?
All the life and colour and fun and weirdness of the seventies and eighties became the sophisticated, styled, subtle nineties and noughties. We look back and scoff at the 'style mistakes' of that era, but the only mistake we ever made was to let ourselves be convinced that blandness is the new psychedelic.
When did our society start drowning in Chalk USA?
And how will we ever rescue it?
* Sorry Mum, but you know it's true.
[Image via Pinterest]