Who Needs Mellow Yellow?

iPhone Photo Chronicles ~ Who Needs Mellow Yellow? ~

Who Needs Mellow Yellow?, originally uploaded by Paris Set Me Free.

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I know I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s still amazing to be practically bludgeoned to death by three different yet identical rag vendors trying desperately to be the one to thrust their particular version of exactly the same thing into your sweaty little hand.

It’s beautifully orchestrated, bollards have been prerequisitioned, bin lids reserved and territories marked out to the nearest inch: the free newspaper pushers leave nothing to chance.

In the green corner we have Metro, in the blue, 20 Minutes and in the red, Direct Matin. And I wish there was more to distinguish them than that, but I’m scraping the barrel.

The people handing them out can’t exactly be part of the management so in the back of my head I’m wondering why they don’t just do what I used to do when I delivered free papers door to door as a kid: dump the lot of them and hope the editor doesn’t live on the round.

But that’s probably the thing – there are probably special members of staff who do the rounds anonymously, checking that the three of them aren’t sitting in a café surrounded by piles of unthrust dust waiting till it stops raining to head home via the nearest paper recycling point.

When I was attending English teaching conferences, I remember a new grammar testing book being promoted by a funny guy. The established competition was rude, in the form of two books by someone called Murphy, funny as that may seem; a lower level tome, known fondly as ‘the Red Murphy’, and a slightly higher level volume, referred to as ‘the Blue’.

And this grammar guru started his presentation by justifying the temerity to enter an already crowded market by claiming that after a great deal of reflection on what approach to take, he and his partner finally decided that what the English teaching book really needed was a Yellow Grammar Book, and hence his new offering was bright banana, and all the cheerier for it.

So to take up the theme again, I wonder how long it’ll be before there’s a new morning misery pedlar clogging up the bottom of the escalator just a little bit more, dressed in the statutory bright, logo-emblazoned jacket, the cheery if slightly manic smile, and the industry standard baseball cap stuck on their head, all in a very fetching shade of bright lemon.

Hey, maybe it’ll be me. I’ll invent a new way of looking at the day. I’ll only publish the day’s good news so all my pages will be blank for people to colour in any way they wish, adults and children alike, or make paper aeroplanes or origami frogs which take on a life of their own and end up taking over entire train carriages in a jumping jelly of joy. I’ll give out free smiley badges and t-shirts instead of coffee capsules samples for machines I don’t possess. I’ll beg them not to take my paper, sitting stubbornly on stacks of the things, clutching on to each copy offered for grim life, and the rarity value will send my results through the roof, while the other rainbow children can only look on and weep.

Have a mellow day.

J è  GRAB MY 20 AMAZING PARIS CURIOSITIES FREE NOW!  ç J

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