Colour my world

Spring is pretty too, with its more extensive collection of rainbow shades, but I can’t love it as much when it delivers itchy eyes, a runny nose and enough sneezing to upset a middle-aged pelvic floor that bore three children more than a decade and a half ago.

The white mist, sparkling icicles that catch golden early morning sun rays and lush, damp green foliage of winter are also lovely, but I’m about as fond of the coldness as I am of that bladder-breaching sneezing.

Summer’s orange sunsets and pink skies are aesthetically pleasing as well, but autumn still takes the warm-toned cake for me.

As humans, we apparently have the ability to see between one million and 10 million distinct colour variations, unless of course we are tetrachromats, who can see tens of millions more.

If we weren’t human and were mantis shrimp instead, our palette would consist of a spectrum of colours humans couldn’t even fathom.

Anyway, I’m satisfied with my up to 10 million variations of the seven main colours in our rainbow.

Some days I can’t match my earrings gratifyingly enough with my outfit as it is.

I don’t need more choice or confusion.

My social media algorithm must have identified that I’m drawn to colour aesthetics.

As a graphic designer I guess I do consume a bit of that kind of content, but I get suggested posts about pink cafés, colour festivals and, weirdly, AI videos showing dogs blending into their owners’ lounge rooms with matching patterns and colours and the like.

One day, I saw a reel titled ‘cute colour date idea’, which grabbed my attention.

The idea is for you and your date to each choose a colour, then walk around town finding things of that colour to photograph, making a pleasing little screenshot of your phone’s gallery that becomes very matchy-matchy looking.

I didn’t have a date, so I pitched the idea to my kids on a train to Melbourne while we were taking advantage of free public transport.

They were on board (the train and the challenge).

We all chose a colour and aimed to get 12 shots featuring that colour during our day in the city to create neat little three-by-four grids on the train trip home.

I immediately started looking around the train for things that were yellow.

I had five images before we even stepped off on to the platform in the big smoke.

My kids were already rolling their eyes at my obsessiveness.

“It’s not that serious,” my youngest told me.

No, it’s not, but it is that fun, I thought.

To be fair, I did get a little carried away.

Momentarily I forgot to take pictures of the other cool things we were seeing as I searched for my colour with tunnel vision.

I even (perhaps annoyingly) started finding everyone else’s colours for them and pointing them out.

In a case of (suspected) weird rebellion, my eldest seemed to intentionally not photograph anything I pointed out for him.

Maybe he was determined to find his own, but when he fell three pictures short at the end of the day when I had three times the amount we’d settled on, it was obvious who was more excited — and perhaps competitive — about the task.

My youngest and my middle son and his girlfriend all had plenty of shots, but weren’t as enthusiastic about turning them into grids, or sending them to me to do so.

By the end of the challenge, I was left feeling like I’d actually given them a chore that they resented agreeing to.

Oops, I thought, as I questioned my lucidity.

Alas, I was soothed when several of my friends told me how much they loved the idea and the result, and that they were going to do the same thing with their own kids one day.

I sincerely hope their kids eagerly engage.

But if they’re as blasé as mine were about it, at least my mates can rely on me as a back-up date.

I’m a colour collector from way back.