Almost Spring And It Was All Yellow Too

The world might have turned orange overnight thanks to Taylor Swift, but I am still yellow until further notice

Back in January, I was banging on about the Word of the Year. It is a thing that many journallers and women waaaaaay deeper than me choose to do at the start of every year.

By choosing a word for the year, the argument is that it sets intentions, manifests and aligns. I am quoting here, can you tell? It is, thus, terribly sad in my humble opinion that so many people choose words like ‘gratitude’ and ‘strength’ when they could be choosing really fun words instead.

January Me had a long think about this Word of the Year malarkey and, even back then, I was wise enough and old enough to know that a good word of the year, for me, should be a noun, not a verb. Do less, thought I. So instead of choosing a doing word, I chose the word ‘concerts’. I was being facetious. Or was I?

I wrote this: “As an 80s / 90s teenager, we didn’t have words of the year, bullet journals, manifesting, affirmations and soul-centring sticky notes affixed to our bathroom mirrors. My Word of the Year is… Concerts. I feel like good decisions make themselves and require less introspection.”

It’s the last sentence that I now find hilarious (the punks would call it foreshadowing), because it turns out that good decisions do, in fact, make themselves and require riotously little introspection. In fact, as much as I was joking at the time, there is something very powerful about choosing a Word of the Year (ha, plot twist!) because I have genuinely stuck to my guns about concerts. Imagine if I’d chosen ‘wealth’. LOLs.

Anyway, concerts has served me very well… I’ve been a Chris Martin fan – which is arguably different to being a Coldplay fan – since I was deputy editor at celeb mag Heat and we were sent the first pics of him and Gwyneth perched on a set of stairs outside a New York City brownstone clutching a baby scan. The baby scan became Apple Martin. Gwynnie and Chris became iconic in the early 00s and, well, Chris was quietly spoken, smoking hot and very deep. The whole time.

Which was great for me because I was none of those things, but liked all three of these things very much! And since neither Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode nor Rick Astley had swung past my family home to sweep me off my feet, I was having to cast the net wider.

And now - drum roll, please - we’re mere weeks away from the band rolling into Wembley Stadium in London for a historic 10-day residency… So close are the dates in question that Wembley has just, this week, shown off its blatantly favouritist new stairs, painted a splashy shade of happy Coldplay yellow in time for the line-up of concert dates.

Now, without giving any spoilers, guess who will be there? Is it me, you ask? It is, it is me. Zero introspection or spread-sheeted decision making required. So, here’s my plan and also my outrageous (please no financial people be reading this) thinking… Tis better to make good use of a British visa than to waste it. Also, Chris Martin has got to take a break at some point – Coldplay has been on tour since March 2022. Yes, March 2022. In the time, Chris Martin has been performing his Music Of The Spheres World Tour, I have in no particular order:

Resigned from a long career
Started and grown a whole new company
Entered menopause (fokkit)
Seen a child through matric. And a drivers license.
And, most NB, seen a whole lot of other people live in concert.

But not these fellas.

You’d have to have been living deep in the jungles of the Amazon to have missed the most insane online moment of the year Internet Age. A few weeks ago, the music-loving (I am making this bit up, I have no idea if he loves music) CEO and his skittish HR director dropped out of sight, looking wildly panicked at a Coldplay concert. I know you’ve all seen that vid and its bajillions of memes.

They instantly became the most infamous adulterers on Planet Earth. Possibly even further afield than that. Anyhoo, suffice it to say that since I started a company while Coldplay have been on tour, I am theoretically a CEO and I am also legging it off to said concerto with a head of HR. This is not a euphemism. Which as I read this back to myself, I see that it could be.

She is for reals in HR.

She also has an excellent game face, so is more likely to be throwing herself a Chris Martin than out of sight from the jumbotron. We do both love the colour yellow, think Chris Martin is rather luvverley and can’t wait to get our arses to London to celebrate being in London! Can you guess our exact ages from this paragraph? Probably. Yikes! Birding holiday next!

But back to Wembley… The steps are a new art installation by Wembley Park X Pantone, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Yellow, which was released in 2000 - feeling old yet?! By the way, Music of the Spheres is now a $1bn tour that is set to wrap up in September. More than 10m tickets have been sold, making it the most attended tour of all time. Yes, Swifties, it has even surpassing Eras tour.

I know the Swifties won’t mind this fact, this week, as they are all too happy creating orange memes and discussing Taylor’s new album unveiling on Travis’s podcast. I’ll admit - it was a super cute interview. I love Jason Kelce. And I cannot wait to listen to the new album. But until October, my blood is yellow.

What crazy things are you all plotting up in time for Spring?!