For some reason I’ve dressed all in grey and blue today. Grey jeans, grey t-shirt, grey jumper, dark blue trainers with white laces, and my long navy coat.
I look like a pigeon.
Years ago, my Mum got into that old dress-like-a-season thing. It was popular for a while: if you were a ‘summer’ person, you could wear yellow and orange and white and you’d look like you just breezed off the plane from Acapulco... all-year-round. Winter and Autumn people though had to make do with browns and dark greens and icy blues, to match their pale cheeks and bring out the best of their tones. It all came from a book, as I recall, that trod a very fine line when discussing skin colour.
It wasn’t in my mind this morning to deliberately match my face with the colour of the sky, but there I was, greyer than Gandalf in Grimsby. And with shoes and coat on, the Columba Palumbus was completus.
Stephen Fry once said he thought Oscar Wilde would always have been famous, regardless of his plays or his sparkling wit, for how he dressed at Oxford. Wilde was a whirlwind of colour and style in a way that Victorian sepia photographs can’t capture. These days, he’d blend into the sea of individual exhibitionists at University, I’d wager, but back then it was almost scandalous to be so colourful.
Of course, his outrageous brilliance helped in the end. I’m afraid my own genius is much less outrageous and, as a lot of people will tell you, so deeply and expertly hidden as to be questionable in the first-place.
As a case-in-point, I’ve accidentally dressed myself as a pigeon.
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