Grey has nothing to do with joy, optimism, passion or life. Why has the world been drained of colour?
My friend once came to see me in a flat I’d just moved into. This was Lee Dixon, the former footballer and a television colleague at the time. He looked around approvingly but said: “You’ve got to be a bit careful here. Your carpets, your sofa and your walls are all grey. You’ve got these big windows and outside the clouds are grey. Your hair is grey and so are your clothes. Your disposition’s a bit grey sometimes, too. You’re blending in. I can barely see you. You might have to put on some hi-vis.”
Footballers can be terribly savage like this. But I saw Lee had a point, and I’ve been trying to de-grey myself ever since. This is hard in the world we live in. Having chosen a new lease car, I had to select a colour. I was spoilt for choice: there were only shades of grey available, so I plumped for grey. Looking around, it then struck me that most cars are now grey. Apart from the sheer dreariness, this is surely suboptimal in terms of safety; like me in my front room that day, they’re all camouflaged against the roads and, often, the sky.
Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
