Our infatuation with all the different shades of grey is out of control | Peter Goers

The masochism on display in the hit 50 Shades of Grey series is nothing compared to the pain we’re suffering with this craze.

Grey is not the new black. It’s the new yuk. Grey is not very cheery. Prisons are grey. Storm clouds are grey. The dying have a grey pallor.

Yet, damn it all, grey is the prevalent decorator colour of our times.

Look around and see that public buildings and houses (inside and out) are increasingly and insidiously grey.

It’s a charcoal colour often called monument grey. It’s awful. It’s very depressing.

Colour schemes go in decade-long trends and grey is to our time what burnt orange and mission brown were to the 70s.

Orange is coming back for those who cherish retro design but, frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn for orange.

Plus, I can’t wear orange. I look like death in orange which is why I could never be a Buddhist.

Happily, the 50s pink and black bathroom is making a comeback. I digress, but I digress for a living.

Anything brown remains hugely unfashionable. Nobody apart from baby boomers wants brown furniture.

Beautiful antique cedar and mahogany furniture goes for a song as, inexplicably, the young want to spend more on environmentally catastrophic white or grey furniture they have to assemble themselves and will soon fall apart (them and the furniture) and will soon be on the verge (or a nature strip in the western suburbs) in pathetic pieces.

The 60s gave us primary colours, the 80s gave us pastels (revived from the 50s) and puffy sleeves and shoulder pads.

The 90s gave us heritage green and beige and ivory colours (or lack of colour thereof) and Bunnings built green cathedrals of hardware everywhere.

The use of greys in interiors is very popular at the moment.

Now everything has to be white or grey. This is the new beige and it’s known as “greige”.

Suddenly it’s as though we’re all living in a black and white movie. Interior designers and real estate agents call grey, the “hero hue”.

I may vomit.

This ubiquitous wet blanket of a colour is called monument grey, basalt, slate and the patented names given the infinite variety of greys by paint purveyors are absurd.

You can graze greys and chose from Chic Shadow, Polished Pebbles, Purbeck Stone, Agreeable Grey, Malay Grey, Metal Links, Salinger, Private Jet, Cold Metal, Iron Gate, City Shadow and, wait for it, Passive and Down Pipe.

50 Shades Of Grey only used to be associated with the books and movies.

My favourites are Mole’s Breath, Elephant’s Breath and, most risible of all, Flooded Gum.

So you’re visiting your fun friends Bree and Brandon who are lucky enough to live in a huge townhouse with a huge feature garage on a tiny block in the unfashionable end of Norwood (north of The Parade).

They moved there with an enormous mortgage so they can send Taylah, Minnesota and Frank to Marryatville High.

The townhouse has five bathrooms and a patio with an outdoor kitchen, wood pizza oven, lap pool and no trees, enclosed by vast grey fences.

As you quaff an Aperol spritz and tuck into the charcuterie you say, “I love what you’ve done to this house”. Bree coos, “Thanks. The grey is Flooded Gum with accents of Wombat Poo” And Brandon says, “Have some more brie, Bree …”

The kids are all on devices in their bedrooms with slate grey en suites.

Interior designers love trendy colours because when people get sick of those colours they get more work to change interiors with something else just as awful although nothing is as awful as this preponderance of greys.

Feature garages are another contemporary curse. You look at a modern house and all you can see is the garage.

Everyone seems to want a home that looks like a storage unit – in grey.

Then people fill their feature garages with stuff they don’t want in their characterless white and grey houses so there’s no room for the cars and no driveway so their cars clutter the streets. Sigh.

Isn’t there enough grey in the world without our eyes having to fall on it everywhere?

Fifty Shades Of Grey was a stupid book and movie about sad-masochism but the fifty shades of grey we are living with are even worse and just as punishing.

Originally published as Our infatuation with all the different shades of grey is out of control | Peter Goers