The colour grey

There is another heavy rainstorm coming, supposed to start after midnight, but around suppertime the air was calm and the harbour was grey and still. The clouds on the other side were in soft white and grey layers with some small patches of pale blue showing through. The light from the west was diffuse, there was no wind, and the whole scene made me think and feel, pearly grey.

There is something to love about certain phases, shades, or modes of grey. It can provide a setting or background for other more dramatic displays of colour, like a lowbush blueberry in fog, and it can be its own thing, a subtle statement of a place on the grey scale, like my friend Stephen’s short grey hair when he wore his (also grey) polo shirt.

My eldest granddaughter likes to ask me what is my favourite colour – hers are green and purple right now – and I usually tell her yellow, though I am not at all sure it isn’t grey.

Garry Neill Kennedy – a piece of his work, Simple Functionalism, is shown above – has explored the shades of grey used to paint naval ships and ship numbers. It makes me think of battleship grey, though Garry’s work shows that there is not just one of them, but many variants of the shade in various navies around the world.

Here are some other (non-military) greys for you to imagine:
• dove grey
• grey wolf
• pearl grey
• grey whale
• shingle grey
• grey dawning
• gull grey
• grey birch
• pussy willow grey


And, for this grey April day, here is one of Yeats’ loveliest:


When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.