Guess what? Cadbury’s Dairy Milk wrappers are - wait for it - purple!

I discovered this, last week, quite by chance, after 58 years of believing them to be blue. That’s right: blue. Like beetroot.

I think I have mentioned here, before, that I am colour blind, and that, to various extents, one in 12 men (but only one in 200 women, curiously) have the same problem. I am colour blind enough to own a petrol mower, on account of I decided the electric one I previously used, with its orange cable that was virtually the same colour as the grass, was a fatal accident waiting to happen.

My minor disability doesn’t usually produce many issues, but, like those proverbial buses, I shouldn’t be surprised when several turn up at once. Last Sunday I was out with the cycling club when one of my fellow riders commented on the beautiful colours of the trees at this time of year. In my world trees are always the same colour.

And the previous day I witnessed the worst crime against colour blindness I have ever seen in my life. I don’t watch much football these days, but my attention was drawn to a match between Queens Park Rangers and Leeds United. To my eyes, QPR had white shirts, white shorts and white socks and Leeds were in white shirts, white shorts and white socks. Confused? I was - until my wife pointed out that one side was wearing shirts that she described as spearmint green.

Meanwhile, the twitter account about colour blindness (un)awareness, @colourblindorg, drew attention to a recent match between Burton Albion and Wimbledon in which both teams wore yellow and black - unless you weren’t colourblind, in which case Burton were in bright green shirts. Or was it Wimbledon?

In rugby, this happens at the very highest level, with South Africa wearing green shirts and Wales dark red ones in the recent World Cup semi-final, no less, even though any twerp could have told them this was going to be hopeless for the red-green colour blind.

If you follow sports like horse racing and cycling you accept it is going to be difficult to pick out riders’ colours, but in football and rugby it could be easily remedied, so you have to conclude that the authorities just don’t care that millions of paying customers can’t follow the game.

People rarely think about colourblindness. Even professional designers. Even that masterpiece of graphic design, the London Underground map, features colour-coding that causes the Bakerloo, District and Central Lines to merge into a bowl of spaghetti before my very eyes.

It’s as thoughtless as the person who coined the phrase ‘as red as a beetroot’ - because my wife informs me that beetroot is, in fact, purple, and since my eyes struggle to detect red, therefore turning purple into blue, it should be ‘as blue as a beetroot’.

Being colourblind can have its challenges, but there are benefits. In an increasingly ‘I’m all right Jack’ country, where empathy and/or sympathy for others seems to be in short supply, it’s a blessing to be constantly reminded that the world I see is much different to how it would look if I could see it through somebody else’s eyes. In another words: next time somebody makes you see red or feel blue, don’t be green and judge them so hastily, because although they may look like they are in the pink and going through a purple patch, they could be feeling marooned.

So it’s time to be nicer to each other.

Of that you can be azure.