Gris ça change

  It had started off as such a beautiful day, even the back of the shopping centre, with its grubby lock-ups and piles of discarded packaging, looked glorious. I even texted my friends to say so. By midday, I was receiving messages doubting my honesty as, once more, Paris had donned its sullen autumn cloak.
  This garment, however, provides no warmth or comfort, but both suffocates and chills simultaneously,  blanketing the world in dour grey. This colour seemed to pervade everything. The windows of the nondescript office building in the nondescript suburb, amplified it, reflecting the drabness into every unstable paving slab, patch of scraggy grass and denuded tree. The fumes of post-lunch smokers further enhanced the monochrome; their glowing tips barley registering a spark.
  Back in town the change of season has been even more insidious. Parisians, who seem to subscribe to the Henry Ford school of fashion, "you can wear any colour, as long as it's black", have turned the Grand Boulevards into shuffling conveyor belts of gunmetal, charcoal and slate.
  The Metro has become almost unbearable. How come there is so much less room? Has there been a sudden, adult-sized baby boom? Ah, no, the reason I can barely breath is the masses of fake fur, wool, cashmere and synthetic fibres (all grey) that the masses are huddled inside as the thermometre dares to dip into single figures.
  Into all of this muffled grey and pinching cold comes the hopeful twinkle of a season still a month off, Christmas. The longed-for jingle of a chorus of cash registers and the bounteous bleeping of credit card readers, have brought the first fizz of festivity to the shop windows of L'Escargo.
  Forgive my cynicism here - anyone who knows me knows I am the happiest of sand boys come Christmas day - but maybe you haven't seen the displays. Only cash, perhaps with a touch of sadistic psychology and a pinch of insane tastelessness, could have inspired the front of Gallery Lafayette.
  The Harrods of Haussmann has gone all out this year, keeping us in wrapped suspense since October. When the boards were removed from the windows, what greeted eager, expectant eyes was a simply hideous, nightmarish pastiche. Juddering and jiggling polystyrene puppets with maniacal grins and arching eyebrows, wires clearly visible, played out normally fun-filled scenes (skating, dancing, hot-air ballooning?) in ways that would make Tim Burton shudder.
   Further down, the regular, faceless manikins have been have been joined by a taxidermists menagerie of Christmas creatures; swans, polecats and leopards (in one store I even saw a gazelle in a waistcoat having Christmas dinner with a grizzly bear).
   You'd have expected any decent onlooking consumers to be outraged, covering up their children's innocent eyes. Far from it! They gaze and gawp, taking hushed and exited pictures. As I manoeuvre my way through them on that first afternoon after the unveiling, I figured that there must be something blinding their common sense. Actually, it was quite obvious. Just as most people here had been over the last month, their synapses had been suffocated by that most Parisian fifty shades of grey.