Well, colour me happy but isn’t neutral nice, after all

Rab, who is a primary colours kind of guy, wonders if there could be something to the grey or white colour schemes that are all the rage. Perhaps he should consult a book on interior design...

H ere’s another thingi’m-not-very-good-at idea: interior decor. No mature sense of colour, d’you see?

As regular readers will know, I’m your man for primary colours from the nursery, yellow being my favourite for indoors (and out, when I get away with it in hodden grey Scotland), but I’ll also work with reds, blues and greens when the mood takes me, which it frequently does.

Indeed, recently, I painted the kitchen bright green and am happy to acknowledge that it doesn’t work. You start off with a daub from a tester kit. Hmm, yes, I think that works. Another daub: like it! One last daub: yes, that’ll do the trick.

So you buy the full tin and, instead of daubs, you administer sploshes. And, yes, it looks great, getting better with every splosh, until it’s finished and you stand back… and it looks terrible.

Ah well, you win none, you lose some. I’ve always deplored that Scandi all- Hide in plain sight: Rab could have sworn he put his bookcase in this room. Picture: Getty Images. white or “neutral” colouring, which is everywhere nowadays and may be the explanation for why society generally has turned into one giant padded cell.

That said, when I touched up the skirting boards and doors with white it really brightened the place up. So I started to look again at some of the grey and white colour schemes and I could see that, in their own way, they were actually quite bright.

No doubt, as per usual, I will start to get into it properly just as it goes out of fashion and everyone is painting their walls mauve.

I witter thus in the wake of news about the latest trend: shelving books with their spines to the wall so that their cheerful, multi-coloured chaos doesn’t disrupt one’s grey-white colour scheme but blends in with it perfectly.

The idea, by lifestyle writer Lauren Coleman, led to outbreaks of rioting in several rural areas. More seriously, in the bizarre world in which we have been sentenced by a higher court to live, she started to receive threats of violence.

She said: “I know books are very emotive and do carry a huge amount of meaning for people, but it is going a bit far to threaten to beat me up about it.” As the furore went viral and the vitriol got worse, she stopped reading comments on her blog for the sake of her sanity.

If I were her, I’d go to the self-help section – annexe, in my case – of her book collection and find something to calm her nerves: except, how could you find the right book if all the spines containing the titles are facing the wall?

Oddly enough, I’ve a shelf of books with the spines facing the wall: tomes that have been written by friends.

I’ve been told since the year dot that I should write a book, and it has never worked out, but nearly all my friends have written one, and I got so fed up about it that, one day, in a fit of envy, I turned all their spines to the wall. That’ll put their backs up.

However, I’m unlikely to do the same with the rest of my collection. Lauren, I fear, has taken things too far. The question is: will her idea catch on? Of course it will.