This is still my stuff.

As in every other recent winter, I tried to go clothes-shopping yesterday. Everywhere I went, I encountered a farrago of suspiciously drab hues; mostly sluggish greys, but also mucky browns, dirty greens, shifty-looking blues. What's with all this? We know it's winter, we know it's miserable and raining and shitty and cold. We can hardly avoid knowing it. Surely we don't need to be reminded of this all-permeating fact by the sight of every passing person blending into the next through their co-operation in this conspiracy of crud? I want bright! I want shiny! I want us all to stand out in our rainwear and I want to feel happily dazzled by vivid vermillions and acute aquamarines and day-glo oranges and acerbic lemons and louche lime greens and frightening fuschias!

I must have gone to twenty different shops, in England's London's famous Oxford Street and its nearby Covent Garden, and my eyes were dripping visual rust by the time I could take no more. Are you manufacturers in league with some hidden ministry of moping? Are the Powers that Be using clothing design to manipulate our mood and stifle open revolt? Or, worse, is there some unspoken yet universally-accepted agenda, on which such agency may piggy-back undiscovered, that because it's wearisome winter-time, we're damn-well going to mope about and feel rotten and subdued? Well I won't have it, I tell you. I found one bright yellow shirt, and I damn-well bought it. Have at you, you couturiers of the crappily crepuscular.