Today's forecast: the colours we need most

"Is this emotional support umbrella actually helping?" grey

Nov 13, 2024

Naming colours is a much-loved part of my professional life.1

'Is this metallic glitter mushroom safe to eat?' grey.

'Oh I love this song!' bone.

Fancy, whimsical. But my first-ever colour observation, scrawled in a school copybook, was simply: 'It is another dull day.'"

None of us are sure who taught me what a 'dull' day was. Those news copybooks filled with lopsided childish crayon clouds have become an inside joke in my family. But that early obsession with Dublin's greyness? That came from somewhere real.

We'd just moved back from New Jersey, where I'd lived from ages three to seven. It was the early 90s, which in Dublin looked like the 70s as far as I was concerned.

The shift was jarring - not just the culture shock of going from endless cartoon channels to two stations of grown-up TV, or discovering my granddad's car didn't have seat-belts in the back, and his rotary phone lived at the end of a long, unheated hallway.

No, what really got to me was the sky.

The closeness of it in Ireland – claustrophobic, no escaping it. I'm 39 now and I've gotten used to the press of clouds. In fact, I prefer gloomy, darker days that require jumpers and mugs of hot chocolate.

But what I hate is the pale light. That teethy grey light.

Today, my dear readers, even here in Belgium it is an extremely dull day, both inside as well as outside. All the news in the world is depressing as hell, and that grey light out there in the everything seems to reflect it, leeching colour from the very air I'm breathing.

While the world outside does its best impression of "Is this emotional support umbrella actually helping?" grey,we can use colours to fight back (at least within ourselves).

Here's what I've been up to at my "studio" (read: kitchen table, among yesterday’s breakfast crumbs). I hope these dispatches from my color-hunting expeditions keep you alive and vital for another day. Consider them small acts of rebellion against that gunmetal sky that's been trying to steal all our crayons.

Until next time, fellow colour collectors.

Oh hey no sorry I’m back! There's a passage about colour that's stayed with me since my teenage reading of Brian Keenan - one vivid moment during his captivity that seems particularly relevant right now:

"But wait. My eyes are almost burned by what I see. There's a bowl in front of me that wasn't there before. A brown button bowl and in it some apricots, some small oranges, some nuts, cherries, a banana. The fruits, the colours, mesmerize me in a quiet rapture that spins through my head. I am entranced by colour. I lift an orange into the flat filthy palm of my hand and feel and smell and lick it. The colour orange, the colour, the colour, my God the colour orange." ― An Evil Cradling