Avocado:
Avocado first reared its bilious head in '67, and by '68, America was awash in the stuff. In no time at all, you could not get yellow, nor could you get turquoise. Avocado was touted as the "colour that goes with every other colour", which I am here to tell you it did not. My mom ruined a very nice yellow and turquoise kitchen by bringing avocado into it (she couldn't afford to redo the turquoise Formica, and the clash of colours was painful indeed to behold).
I hated avocado on sight, and hated it worse when my perfectly attractive turquoise bedroom was repainted in it by my mother, who never met a shade of green she didn't like (she favoured it so much that when she'd buy me school clothes, most of them would be green, with the predictable result that I would sooner go naked in public than wear anything green today).
1968 was also the year that Ye Olde Fayke Woode Graine was plastered all over everything, from can openers to cars. My damn fountain pen had woodgrain on its clip! I finally saved up enough money for a Parker 45, to have something free of synthowood.
There was a lot of good design around in the 1960s, but there was a lot less of it in the last years of the decade. Everybody just went plain damn nuts there, covering up clean-lined Sixties decor with avocado shag, fake panelling, and even fake-er Styrofoam beams glued to their ceilings. I personally do not wonder that so many young people turned to drugs in those years- they damn well needed them to escape the deluge of fakery and vomitous colours.
I was there, kiddies, I was there.
