Colour, Me Happy

Colour makes me happy. I normally walk around serious streets that blend into each other with their neutral shades of stone, cement and brick. Whenever a bright colour pops out at me, I can’t help but smile. I become as happy as a child with a box of crayons except I don’t feel the urge to colour everything in my path with waxy abandon. Learning how to colour within the lines was a challenge for a girl who wanted to spread the happiness off the page, onto the floor and and as high up walls as she could reach. Over time, this childish obsession with vibrant, life-affirming colour seeped into my wardrobe, home and of course, my stationery drawer. Every time I take out my set of 10 Staedtler pens in a class, my (adult) students chuckle but they have now learnt that using colour makes anything more fun. And fun, my friends, makes things easy-to-remember.

I remember most things that are in colour but if it is text, a strong font and format are helpful too. If everything was colourful, I reckon I would have a hard time singling things out in my memory but colour makes my experiences more memorable. Sometimes, I forget the important details of the experience and only recall the colour in it. My brother’s famous example is my memory of him wearing green socks one particular day in our childhood special for some other reason. Despite the many re-tellings of the real occasion, I cannot remember what actually happened that day. Colour is just one of the ways that I group things  in my life but it is by far, the most attractive solution for the most complex problems I face. That’s right. Colour solves things.

Call me crazy but I recently started a course called ‘An Introduction to Mathematical Thinking’. As someone who had a blinding mental block to mathematics, I never believed that I could enjoy playing with numbers and funky symbols. Having a math-geek for a husband helps but what makes my re-discovery of mathematics infinitely easier are my colourful ‘problems’. It is so much fun to talk myself through proofs of theorems that affect pretty much nothing in my life when I have my colour pens at the ready. Jotting down every single step in my thought process is no longer tedious. I wish I did this at school. Colour makes things accessible because colour makes me happy.

Double-take

Surprise free afternoons are great. Crossing things off a to-do list earlier than expected, I can wander free and roam wide, going wherever my feet or my stomach take me. I keep discovering new corners of my adopted city, wondering how another gem had escaped me until then. With no guide book in hand, I stumble on some of Vienna’s treasures completely by chance. I sniff out my adventures in a variety of ways. I sometimes hear some music or spot an interesting shopping bag or catch a whiff of something delicious or simply follow the crowd when I get off a tram somewhere completely new.

One such afternoon, I asked a lady who was getting on my tram where she got the unusual flowers she was carrying and realised that it was just around the corner. I promptly jumped off and made straight for the flower shop. What greeted me round the bend was a market I’d been to before but this time I approached it from another side.  Even though I was slightly disappointed it wasn’t a completely new place, I decided to take a second look. Ambling past stalls with fresh produce, I began to notice things I hadn’t the last time I was there. Not only did I find the unusual flower shop, I also observed the demographic around me start to change.

As I tried to find a non-creepy place to watch the life around me, I stumbled into Himmelblau and almost forgot my mission. I got distracted by all the gorgeous Indian-looking prints in the shop and gently picked up and replaced quite a few things before I realised there was a matching cafe through a secret doorway hiding in plain sight. How had I missed this little gem before? Unashamedly feminine and playful in its decor, this cafe was perfect for me sans husband. Munching on yummy salad and sipping fresh carrot juice, I looked out onto the street to witness the slices of society at the market that day.

Friday afternoons are seemingly when the yummy mummies with fashionable buggies meet working friends who aren’t accompanied by little people. Eventually, the partners of the largely female populace start to appear and many greeting kisses are exchanged. The waiters of the cafés scurry around to add chairs to growing tables and start taking several new orders while picking up cutlery that children fling in all directions. Retirees meet young professionals one can only assume are their children who they are clearly proud of. A book club convenes and serious chatter is punctuated with laughter. Many exclamations are made and there is a general air of relaxed friendship and familiarity. This afternoon changed my perception of a notoriously snobbish district of Vienna. I saw something different. I am happy I chose to take a second look.

Reading in Public

Does anyone know why we go to cafés to read? Reading is arguably a private affair; one that requires concentration and a fair amount of time. Unless you have a soap-box from which to megaphone your manifesto, reading in public is generally a quiet pastime and some might even say, an anti-social one. In Vienna, a city dedicated to the art of whiling away hours of your life drinking beverages, reading in public is no new trend. In Alt Wiener-style establishments, regulars are brought their coffee and their favourite newspaper bound between two wooden splints. Public private reading is not just accepted in these ornate coffee-houses, it is encouraged. Have a cuppa, sit a while and read in peace.

In many modern cafés you will find that newspapers have been replaced by magazines and tabloids. The truly on-trend café however, not only upgrades you from smut to classic literature but offers you the option of buying the reading material you see. Café Phil is one such trendy hipster locale. You are invited into their exposed concrete space to sit as long as you like, drink ‘homemade’ beverages (100% fairtrade, of course) and gaze at their rows of contemporary and classic tomes every time you look up from your Macbook. You can buy some of the motley artistically random collection of furniture and furnishings just in case you felt the need to reconstruct a perfect reading area. What you can’t recreate at home is the quiet hum of conversation of other ‘organic’ people and background music that isn’t distracting because you don’t know the artists.

This schizophrenic place jumps from café to bar to counselling centre to bookshop to restaurant to chair village to retro-ville in a matter of seconds. I love sipping my way through a good book but I’m not sure I could in such a self-conscious manner. Reading to me, is absorbing another’s words, engrossing yourself in a written world to make you completely unaware of your surroundings. When I entered this carefully curated area I felt an instant urge to resist the indie being stamped on me but I soon found myself thumbing through books that looked cool enough to read in public and even ended up researching retro-bikes on my way home. Reading in public can do that to you.

Long Island Iced Tea

When I decided on this thing called marriage I knew I had to make some pretty incredible promises. I promised the love of my life that I would above all, prioritise our relationship. I would always work hard at keeping ‘us’. My promises mean that I make time for us even when there are a million other things that I just have to do. I love having many things on the go at the same time so carving out special time for just the two of us can be tricky. A life-lesson I choose to learn everyday. I have to give my full attention to the one I made my promises to and re-discover why I made them! It is easy to roll off a few tender sounding goodbye phrases without thinking but when I realise that they were the only interaction we had all week, some alarm bells start ringing.

My husband has an amazing ability to slow down and give me a hug whatever is going on and I sometimes wish I was quicker at giving and receiving love when I’m in the middle of something. Truth is, I’m always going to be in the middle of something. I need to choose. I need to prioritise. My laundry, lesson-planning, hosting, baking and other things can fit around what’s really important. In an effort to get my mind to leave what my hands have left behind, I have to ask questions. I get my mind to focus on our conversation rather than the task I busied myself with earlier. This tests my promises more than anything I had ever anticipated.

We spent a Saturday strolling along the long island in the middle of the Danube, baking slowly in the sun as we watched various groups of people enjoying time out together. We spoke very little for the first part of our 5 mile walk because we had some quarrel so unimportant I cannot even remember what it was about. As we marched through our conflicted feelings, drinking our iced teas to avoid snapping, we both reached the end of our stubborn resistance and through gritted teeth conceded that we loved each other. That gave way to remembering the promises we had made. This softened us to the point of wanting to understand each other, asking questions without being distracted by the activity or beauty around us, to become interested in the answers. We decided to be interested in ‘us’.

Fruit in my wardrobe

One of the best things about summer in Austria is the abundance of yummy fruit. Melons, kiwi-fruit, berries and my new favourite, saturn peaches. As the seasons change, I enjoy picking fruit that mirrors the weather and my mood. The bright citrus colours in summer fruit stalls inevitably make their way into my wardrobe because someone informs the fashion gods about the amazingness of neon. There has never been a colour trend I’ve enjoyed more than this. Small doses are key however, as I am not a teenager, impossibly cool or of small proportions. Like happiness, just a little goes a long way. 

To avoid looking like a bumble-bee, traffic-cone or police-car, I team my vibrant wardrobe choices with muted earthy tones or white. A pair of white jeans (I found for all of €1 in a fleamarket and then bleached) were a step up from my usual khaki shorts and helped me wear my citrus to work without shocking anyone. I am happy to report that fruity tones are now accepted in some of the most conservative working environments known to man.

Take the often misunderstood kiwi-fruit, for example. Wearable? Oh yes. This hairy fruit with a hidden brilliance was my inspiration when choosing a dress for a wedding. I skipped on the hairiness and angled for the simple sophistication of the intense clover-green. This couldn’t have been more fitting for a celebration in Ireland.  As someone who owns too many black clothes, I would never have imagined saying that done right, bright colours have a way of making anything special. Playfully chic.

Some might argue that crazy neons just don’t work with their skin-tone or personality or some other unique thing so here’s a solution, pick a different fruit! Switch red for peach and white for cream like a saturn peach does and watch the delectable outfit unfold. If you’re not sure how bright you can go, look at the humble plum. Deep blue-violet-grey on the outside and muted brown-red-yellow on the inside, what’s not to love! Keep it simple, accessorise with delicious colours to warm up and you’ll be well on your way to getting some fruit in your wardrobe.