What’s Your Favourite Colour?

What and Why So? Simple Questions; My Answers (1).

What’s Your Favourite Colour?

Good questions are the simplest.

I’ve always found that when in need of a conversation starter; go back to the old favourites. The classics of “What’s Your Name?”, “How Old Are You?” and “Can You Smell That? GOOD!” are reliable to see you through any introduction and can indeed let blossom a real keeper of a conversation.

In these simple proddings; the complex revelations come forth, and I hope that throughout this series they shall come forth mightily.

What is your favourite colour?

Who, me?

Beige.

Beige.

What?

Now I’m a fan of Billy Connolly and I’m aware of and enthralled by his near-disregard-but-more-like-“I’m-going-to-Scottish-you”-contempt for the colour. I am aware of the focus upon beige as being the sort of colour you’d feel comfortable leaving your children with whilst you went out for a night on the town; painting it Red with Blue language, uploading something Green and Orange by the end of it.

The issue I have with this is that being dependable is not necessarily a bad thing; it merely suffers connotations of dullness.

Not that I’m the hero you can count on; suffering myself as I do with plentiful heaps of flakiness. I’m so flaky you can stick me in an ice-cream; not that I’d keep to that for long before changing my mind.

Beige is also my natural colour; my tint upon this Earth. I was born beige and shall die so; tattoos permitting. I’ve been referred to by every racial slur under the sun; with accusations of Arab ancestry being my most frequent asundering. The unfortunately ill-educated folk of the town in which I was raised found my darker skin colour baffling; though delighted in the chance to call me nigger and (once) tell me to go back to Swaziland.

They weren’t even good at being racist; the colours were too much for them.

I was picked on for being a colour I wasn’t. I dazzled them with beige.

Not that I hold any grudge against beige; only a hope that it should come to succeed its history of dull association and instead reveal itself to be the dependably brave and weird colour you’ve been looking for.

I’d like to go a’peacocking in beige; save only for the problem that the clothing Beige comes in less than flattering cuts.

All those other folk out there yell around about red. The colour of passion and danger, love and blood. Rubies and lips. Not really, guys. Not really. Only firemen live up to this classification; being as they are folk who spend their working hours on fire, kicking down doors, saving dangling damsels, retrieving cats from trees and holding axes.

I have ambition of doing all that, 9 to 5 and as a hobby too, all whilst doused in Beige.

Blue tries to suggest it is the colour of cool and cold. No way funny face. Blue is a damning attempt in ordering the populace to calm down and enjoy your journey through the system. Blue tries to tell me what to do, whilst I’m waiting in a waiting room (that’s what you’re supposed to do in them) and Blue says: “Wait longer; and be more subjugate.”

Someday I shall make red upon them all. I’ll do what I want in waiting rooms. Beige things.

Black. Oooh dear me; Black. Poor little old Black. Nothing wrong with Black in and of itself; but for the pesky Lord of the Rings consistency of making “dark Lord” and “Black lands” the epitome of evil.

Whatever did Black do to you, J.R.R? Aside from that whole spooky night-time-can’t-see-stubbed-toe-can-I-hear-a-growl issue you really should have gotten over by now by now (being deceased and all).

Poor old Black.

In the same vibrant vein, White isn’t so grand a thing either.

A White dress doesn’t make the woman a keeper and a White horse doesn’t make the rider moral.

The White be noteth thee goodeth.

Yellow is like the Plan B of the rainbow.

Only things that are currently Yellow are meant to be Yellow. Naturally I’d prefer my lemons to be Yellow and for my blondes to remain so, but I want nothing else to be Yellow.

Green is a liar. Nuclear-aliens or Mother Nature’s ivy….crikey Green; make up your mind. Just be yourself. Don’t do what the rest of the rainbow tells you to be.

I just come back to Beige, once again.

Beige is a colour one can rely on; I just hope to wear it in adventure enough that people might rely on it for things less dull in the future.

I want to paint the town Beige; the colour of cool and dangerous love you can rely on.

So in what I hope was a more complex answer to the simple question, my colour is Beige.

Next time; how old am I?

Sam