Show your true colours.

 According to paint spruiker Pantone, the colour for 2011 is honeysuckle. It hails the reddish pink as “a brave new colour for a brave new world”. Whereas last year’s turquoise served as “an escape”, honeysuckle “emboldens us to face everyday troubles with vitality and vigour”. Who writes this crap? And why do we need a colour of the year anyway? Can’t we choose our own? I’m betting Pantone had a squiz in its stockroom and figured it needed to shift a few units of red pigment.

 I’m all for directions in fashion, but homes are not fashion statements. You don’t take them off at the end of the day; they are your end of the day. Or, they used to be. Maybe I’m just miffed because we’ve repainted our kitchen light green, which is just, like, so 2010. But it’s also because homes are losing their character as we follow trends and stuff them full of plasma televisions, go-with-everything-beige and seascapes that owe nothing to a spot of beachcombing, but rather a trip to Jedo’s Beach House.

 Home porn is the fix of choice for many a Gen Xer, and I’m as beguiled as the next. But the increase in homewares stores has robbed us of our imagination. We no longer collect things lovingly over a lifetime. Instead, to steal a bit of interior decorator jargon, we ‘dress’ our homes as if to showcase them, rather than live in them.

 A friend and I laugh about these styling follies. I loathe bowls of limes – does the inhabitant really exist on a diet of margaritas? – and those signs spelling out ‘relax’ in jaunty cursive, usually positioned above the sort of gleaming kitchen in which no one has ever relaxed. Her pet hates? “Beds made with so many layers and cushions, it would be time to get back into it by the time you’d made it; shoes positioned as artwork; and council clean-up braggarts.”

 In the wake of the floods, I find myself looking at my home and wondering what really matters: a comfortable bed, certainly; enough plates to feed friends; and the morning light through the kitchen window. That’s it. Even my mother’s antique tea sets are just ‘things’.

 One of my neighbours organised a garage sale to raise funds for a flood appeal and, as I filled boxes of belongings to sell, it was sobering to see how little of what we own is either needed or precious.

 I don’t know how it feels to lose your home to a natural disaster, but I doubt anyone who has is thinking much about paint colours. But maybe the people from Pantone are on to something – whether or not you fancy a pink wall, honeysuckle is a gorgeously scented climber that grows vigorously and tolerates hardship. What’s more, it symbolises love.