School Corridor

The school corridor was a lesson in purposeful plainness. Painted in the universal grammar of public buildings: a forgiving beige and a practical, quiet green.It wasn’t a passage but a sentence, painted in two shades of sorry: a wan, digestive biscuit beige and a municipal green the colour of queasy envy. This was the palette of powerlessness, applied not to inspire, but to neutralise ambition and dilute hope.