Let’s go 50 shades of colour, what on earth has happened to the rainbow nation?

This is my first column of 2024, the year in which I’ve been writing columns for a quarter of a century. I intended to talk about new year “intentions”, because that’s what we’re meant to call them these days.

Resolutions leave no wiggle-room; failed resolutions offer no chance of reprieve. Intentions are better for our mental health, they say. An intention has no timeframe. You don’t fail the moment you miss gym once, or have a sneaky glass of wine in Dry January, or fire up a cancer stick behind the shed.

Rainbow nation

Yes, writing about intentions was my intention, but the road to hell is paved with good ones. The truth is, I’m distracted by endless walls of greige.

What on earth has happened to the rainbow nation? When did everything become grey-beige? Shopping centres, office buildings, entire blocks of cookie-cutter homes… the world is what my daughter-in-law calls “millennial grey”.

Is it because South Africa is uniformly depressed? On Boxing Day, I stood on the beach at Bloubergstrand enjoying the vivid kite-surfers, the bright blue sky, the sun on the waves, and then turned to see building after building, every single one its own shade of grey.

It’s visible all the way from Blouberg to Joburg, and beyond. I write this from tasteful “French grey” accommodation in Camps Bay. Did I miss a new bylaw that decreed every surface must be painted in one of 50 approved shades of greige, with the only places granted a reprieve being Bo-Kaap and the beach huts at Muizenberg?

Cravings

I suspect people crave grey calm and stability, yet its ubiquity is creating a soul-sucking suburban sanatorium.

Greige is to the 2020s what brown was to the 1970s, only less interesting. And it’s as miserable as a wet weekend. Sage green, I think to myself, painting each building with new colours in my mind, olive, honey, sunset peach, duck-egg blue, dusty rose, soft yellow, coffee – all shades of nature, all kind on the eye, all gentle on the psyche, all largely absent. Or maybe black.

My Goth friend lived in a black-painted house in Woodstock, and never ever had a break-in. Not until she painted it greige.

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