Can you colourise my life, I'm so sick of black and white?

Today I want to talk about the apparent increasing need for uniformity and order in German society.  This for me is exemplified by the almost complete lack of people choosing cars here beyond black, white and grey. 

Taking a straw poll in our road this morning 65 of 79 cars, that’s 82%, were Black/White/Grey – mostly black.  Henry Ford and Mick Jagger (now there’s an unlikely couple) would be proud.  

This was put into sharp focus for me when recently rewatching the marvellous Smiley’s People with Alec Guinness as George (this one doesn’t say ‘dinosaur’ all the time).  This was set in early 80s Hamburg and the moody shots in car parks revealed a veritable palette of vibrant greens, reds, oranges, blues and yellows.  

What went wrong? – I guess with reunification and then monetary union – Germany has been forced to take up its role as Europe’s very very sensible big brother (vs Flirty France and Sulky UK) and has sensible no nonsense cars to match –none of that vibrant but uncertain Mediterranean colour for us Vielen Dank!  This sensible uniformity is reflected by the rather wonderful Angela Merkel who wears the same jacket every day – but in different colours. http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/shortcuts/2012/oct/09/angela-merkel-jacket-pantone

The down to earth warmth seems to get lost somehow – that chatting to neighbours over the fence just doesn’t happen (unless it’s to complain about your child/noise/trampoline….) and the nearest I have seen to it (in our street) is two middle aged men in their huge BLACK Range Rovers stopped in the middle of the road (blocking it!) and chatting through their open driver’s windows.

Germany is for me like a piece of precision engineered machinery, and with such devices the acceptable tolerance becomes substantially lower.  The lack of tolerance for variety and moving towards uniformity is discussed scientifically as a potential victory for Entropy vs Enthalpy – or put rather better by Visage (also in the early 80s) ‘We Fade to Grey’.  At this point I should declare an interest – if you were to remove grey from my wardrobe – there would not be that much left.  I have been also accused many times of taking a black and white view of the world/people/events…. - which is substantially true. In my defense I would observe that my behavior and personality have been often described as colourful.

What has all this got to do with being a Papa Latte? 

Well one of the values I will be encouraging junior to embrace is to be confident to be different if he so chooses (I’m not sure he will need that much encouragement).  I seem to have had some previous success; as my one of my older sons thanked me in his wedding speech a few weeks ago for helping him 'realize that it’s ok to be a bit weird'

Don’t get me wrong - black and white can be good - and I am considering the ‘Whey Eye Man’ outfit for perhaps the Hamburg Mothers Meeting Christmas Party. http://www.nufcdirect.com/nufc-whey-aye-man-845805

In the short term looking at my grey fleece, socks and muted dark blue shorts  I think that an orange headband and one black sock are in order for the trip to pick up junior from Kindergarten.

So go on put a bit of Meatloaf in your day!