The day I learned that Billy Connolly shared my utter contempt, my revulsion, my deepest loathing for the colour beige, I think I fell a little bit in love with him.
Because to me, beige is the colour of all white underwear after a few turns in the washing-machine. It's the colour snowy white pillow cases turn, so your bold black & white colour scheme exists only in your imagination after a couple of months.
Beige is also the colour of the underneaths of things: the underneath of your most dashingly upholstered sofa is beige. As are the underneaths of my own arms in winter.
Beige too, is renowned for being the colour of stodge: suet dumplings, porridge, sliced bread labelled 'wholewheat', and custard that you make from cornflour because you've run out of Birds gaily familiar yellow powder.
It's also the colour of tie-dyed 'white-bits' when you use Household Bleach to strip colour. Or when it splashes on your clothes - so that instead of looking interesting and Bohemian, one appears instead to look rather grubby.
White is a colour. You can squeeze it out of a tube.
Beige is the colour you are always left with if you forget to change the water in your jar before your brush hits that pure white acrylic from the tube.
It is - one might say - a dead colour. It is an ex-colour.
Beige is where colours go to die.
Not that I'm biased in any way, of course. Neither I am sure, is Mr. Connolly. For one could hardly claim a bias against a colour which doesn't actually exist; but which only manifests when something has gone somewhat wrong.
Beige is the product of malfunction, age & insufficient care and attention. It also shares certain powers with the Cloak of Invisibility in that those who wear it can pass through any space from boardroom to boardwalk entirely undetected.
Now, I hasten to add once more that I really am not at all biased in any way: in fact some of my best friends even wear beige. Though I do try to steer them towards rich, deep cream, or warm coffee colour at least, to help me be more able to pick them out of a crowd when we meet up.
It's just that one starts to feel a little deprived in the current climate because, unfortunately, there is very little I can claim to feel offended by - at a time when when people's sense of personal offence is providing the impetus for the brave new world we've all been dumped into.
Not that I'm being Pollyanna-ish and fatuously claiming all's right with the world. It's just that "offence" is not my driving force. Anger, disgust, concern, despair and many other emotions go spinning and shooting through me on a regular basis when I'm on-line. But offence seems somehow nowhere near adequate as an engine for change. It's somewhat milquetoast-y and gloomily wearying for me.
As is beige.
I do realise that, with so many folk being offended by so many things, I may not garner too many supporters to my BBB group (Ban Bloody Beige.) "Ban Beige" gives one "BB" which, of course, is a type of fire-arm and would be a dead giveaway that one was not a peaceful protester but a Lefty Anarchist, - which would give offence to people who weren't Lefty Anarchists.
But being anti-beige would, I'm sure, catch on eventually and blossom into a movement: people of all creeds and cultures, of many nations, could strive into the future united under the BBB banner.
But, if they don't? Well hey, there's still Billy and Me. I reckon, at a push, the two of us could raise enough ruckus to satisfy us both as the only two people who have so far realised what a world we'd have if we could only ban bloody beige.
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