Sunday, May 20, 2007

WHY MAKE THE DREARY DREARIER?


Car Park
Originally uploaded by
Pete Ashton.
I decided last week after my car's little gearbox problem, that the time had come to buy a new one. Sure it isn't that old at 5, but I'd rather have something I don't need to repair from time to time, buy new tyres for etc. I decided I would prefer a 7-seater this time as I often need to take my 3 kids plus say my parents to the shops or for a day out, which is just much less hassle when I don't then have to force them to bring one of their own cars along. So on to the internet I went to surf myself a nice new people carrier. I tried the obvious in Scotland - that is to say Arnold Clark, and he had a wonderful selection of 1 year old 7 seaters, all makes - the Seat Alhambra, Peugeot 807, Ford Galaxy, VW Sharan, Citroën C8, Renault Espace, Kia Sedona etcetc - you name it - dozens of them - great, but 90% of them were grey or silver.
Why?
Scotland is often a grey, cloudy, dreary and depressing land where you feel you could catch a cloud just by reaching a few centimetres above your head. This isn't like Greece or Italy or the South of France where you are greeted every morning by brilliant blues, sunflower yellows, explosions of purple bougainvillea. We spend 80% of the year looking at grey. So why do we paint our houses grey and fill our roads with grey cars? Can't we have pink houses and yellow cars to make our life a little less dismal?
Anyway as luck would have it, one of the best cars I found on sale at Arnold's with the lowest mileage and highest spec wasn't grey so I bought that. Call back in a few days if you want to see what colour I am trying to brighten the world up with!

1 comment:

The Scudder said...

Purple bougainvillea !!
You've gone off on one again haven't you pet ? This colours thing has "clouded" your literary prose a wee bit here don't you think ?
God knows what you'd have made of old Mr.Ford who sold cars in "any colour you wanted as long as it was BLACK !" Enter Manic Depressive Phyl ? :)