When kids watch adults, they tend to see a lot of ‘meh’. They see us frowning at bills and sighing at washing and dragging our feet out the door to work. They hear us complaining about mess and queues and politics and prices. They watch us struggling and sinking and whinging and procrastinating, and must wonder sometimes what the point is, of growing up.

Unless they spent Sunday morning with 12,000 of us in the Colour Run, where there was none of that. There was glorious mess and laughter – dress ups, dancing, music, bubbles, paint bombs and then fast, fat splodges of rain that drenched us and made the colours run and added steam and mud and gorgeous chaos.

There was nobody ‘old’. Not one person. No tantrums, no ‘hurry up’, no ‘not now’, no ‘be careful’, no ‘be quiet’, no ‘don’t get dirty’ – not a single ‘no’. Just celebration.

Afterwards, there was hosing down. There was showering and shampooing and washing and more shampooing – but it didn’t matter, because twenty years from now, we’ll be saying ‘remember the colour run?’ and smiling.

Now it’s over and it’s Monday and there are school lunches and traffic and deadlines and housework and we’re clean and tidy and normal again (with the odd purple highlight in our hair).

Ever since Mary Poppins sang “A spoon full of sugar”, we’ve been making medicine go down, and unpleasant things more palatable, by adding a dash of something nice.

Maybe we can’t throw corn starch around the office and stand in the rain in our rainbow-stained work suits, dancing, but we can splash colour liberally through our adult lives and bring the fun back.

Where are things beige now?

• Work?
• Relationship?
• House?
• Health?
• Social life?

What would it take to add colour?

• New job?
• Weekend away?
• De-clutter?
• Different food?
• Girls’ night out?

Sometimes all that’s needed to brighten the blah and emerge from a rut is some tweaking. And tweak we must, because there’s fun to be had. There’s colour to be found. There’s mess to make…

There are kids in the wings, taking their lead in life from us. Let’s show them how it’s done.