Merry Greenery everyone!

The best way to predict the future, said the moderately renowned American computer scientist Alan Kay, is to invent it. But unless you’re Nostradamus (ergo, long dead), making predictions is a mug’s game, especially in the twilight of one of the weirdest news years in, well, years.

2016 was the year when no-one saw anything coming, not Donald Trump’s election to the Oval Office, nor John Key’s impromptu abdication from his canonisation as Our Most Popular Prime Minister Ever.

In a year where fake news factories churned out clickbait, it was hard to tell what was fact and what was fiction. Kim got robbed and went offline; Kanye got committed. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The United Kingdom consciously uncoupled from the EU, though it’s yet to physically Brexit, whereas Brad and Angelina called it quits after a squabble on a plush private jet. (And, with apologies to Jen, I’m on Team Brad this time around. Who can blame him for losing his rag when you’re overrun with kids?)

2016 was a very bad year to be an iconic actor, author, singer, despot or a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone: Leonard Cohen, Prince, Harper Lee, David Bowie, AA Gill, Alan Rickman, Ronnie Corbett and Fidel Castro all popped their clogs, as did Celine Dion’s husband, Frank Sinatra’s son and Paul Henry’s dear old mum.

However, 2016, or at least what’s left of it, is shaping up to be a very good year for greenery, indoors and out. That’s because the pigment professionals at Pantone – a corporation of colour swatch soothsayers – have declared this particular shade of guacamole green, better known to global printers and manufacturers as 15-0343, as their official 2017 Colour of the Year.

Greenery, says Pantone, is a refreshing, revitalising, life-affirming shade, symbolic of new beginnings in a time of complex political and social upheaval. ‘‘Greenery evokes the first days of spring when nature’s greens revive, restore and renew... the fortifying attributes signal consumers to take a deep breath, oxygenate and reinvigorate. Greenery symbolises the reconnection we seek with nature, one another and a larger purpose.’’

Any other day, I’d dismiss this newage gobbledygook as PR poppycock, but I’m prepared to promulgate Pantone’s position because green happens to be my happiest hue, my all-time top tint, my most cherished of all colours. You name it, I either grow it or I’ve painted something in it, be it avocado, sage, spirulina, moss, olive, laurel, grass, pistachio, lime, apple, forest, mint or pine. I’m clearly ahead of my time.

Green has been my favourite colour for at least half my life. As an idealistic tertiary student I once enrolled in a night course to ‘‘discover your female intuition’’ and, during a meditation exercise, the tutor intuited that my aura was as green as a celebrity frog singing about rainbows while being perpetually stalked by a shorttempered, love-struck sow.

Green has long been my go-to colour for tins of paint, floral wallpaper patterns, vintage art glass and kitchenware: I own green casserole dishes, green kitchen scales, green tea cups, green flour sifters and salt shakers, spatulas and salad servers.

Strangely, I don’t wear much green but when I got married, I frocked up my bridesmaids in luminous lime organza – they looked, a colleague later said before the wedding photos confirmed it, like line-dancing leprechauns – while the groomsmen sported a single lime-green lisianthus bloom as a buttonhole.

Pantone reckons Greenery is ‘‘nature’s neutral’’, which suggests they weren’t paying attention to their high school biology teacher, for green is not some insipid shade of off-white that property investors slap on their walls so as not to offend potential buyers. Green is the colour of chlorophyll, those magical molecules that let plants produce energy from sunlight, the lifeblood of our planet.

Ask Hayley Holt: green is good. Though, like yellow, with its conflicting notions of cowardice and cheer, green does have a bit of a split personality, representing nature and purity as well as envy and immaturity. And of course, green is a traditional colour of Christmas, so as I bid you glad tidings and salutations for the festive season ahead, I remind you to turn on your garden sprinkler occasionally too, or your greenery shall all be brownery by the end of summer.

Any other day, I'd dismiss this new-age gobbledygook as PR poppycock, but I'm prepared to promulgate Pantone's position because green happens to be my happiest hue, my alltime top tint, my most cherished of all colours.