My youngest granddaughter, who was carrying out the latest of my regular health checks, pushed something yellow and pointed into the side of my head and said, “Grandad, you have rainbows in your ears.”  Now, I have no idea how she was able to see them through what appeared to be a plastic thermometer, but I am very happy to know that they are there.  I am hoping that ideally, should she keep looking, she might also find the unicorn in my soul.  I find it so depressing to think of the brain – the centre of artistic creation, dreams and fantasy –  as ‘grey matter’ when we all want it to sparkle like an iridescent kaleidoscope.  None of us want to be beige between the ears – except, of course, when attending stag/hen parties when the ability to blend in with the wallpaper is highly prized.

The problem with rainbows is in getting them to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it.  Intransigent little bugger your Johnny Rainbow: seldom prepared to be bland when required, seldom prepared to go from A to B without touching the sky somewhere along the way.  We live our lives in colour: red for rage, yellow for sunshine, blue for sadness, eau-de-nil for public toilets and hospital corridors…  Black is the colour of depression.  (Although my mother was happy to argue unrelentingly that black is not a colour, nor, she would assert, is white: they are merely pigments with which to darken or lighten.  In my mother’s world, nothing – except, of course, opinion – was ever black or white.)  Pink for a girl, blue for a boy and yellow for the parents who choose not to know in advance.  (Wouldn’t it be great if these parents could still have the big ‘gender reveal’: Picture the midwife, “Come on darling, you’re doing great, just one last push.  Yes, yes, I can see the top of the balloon right now, it’s…”  “POP!”  “…it’s a boy.  Right, just give me a couple of minutes to mop up the streamers and then you can get on with pushing that entire human being – with what might well feel like a fully grown head – out of there…”  With the current demand for non-gendered pronouns, I can’t help but feel that some of the magic will be lost: “Congratulations Mr & Mrs Smith, it’s a they…”

I have pondered the nature of colour before on this platform.  We all know, for instance, that grass is green, but do we all see the same colour?  Is my green your green, or is it red, even if we both call it green?  No matter what colour you see, if you are told from birth that it is blue, then that is what it is.  I am old enough to remember TV before colour broadcasts and I recall being told that white never appeared quite white enough in monochrome, so the actors had to wear yellow, which appeared much whiter.  It would seem that even in grayscale colour can lie.  My grandchildren believe that, way back when I was like them, the world actually was black and white.  They’ve seen the photographs to prove it. 

I really don’t remember the world of my childhood being monochrome – even though some of it was a little drab – for a child with rainbows in his ears, it held the promise of so much colour… and, of course, “For those of you watching in black and white, the yellow ball is the one behind the brown…*”

Purple Haze all in my brain
Lately things they don’t seem the same.
Acting funny, but I don’t know why.
Excuse me while I kiss the sky.  Purple Haze – Jimi Hendrix (Who famously saw music as colours.)

*Famous BBC snooker commentary from a period when most viewers were still watching the sport in black and white.