Did you know that the human eye can distinguish more shades of green than any other colour?

I chose this green, #33CC33, to commemorate the colour I snubbed during long holidays at home in the English countryside: the sheep-nibbled swards of bright grass, the bluebell leaves that sprouted as a waxy meadow across the forest floor, the greenflies whose soft, translucent bodies blanketed the rose-stems in the garden. The idyll I ignored as I trained my ear to the nasal squeal of the modem and waited patiently to Log On to the Internet.

I can’t have disregarded it entirely, however, because I have remembered that #33CC33 isn’t the same colour as any of those things. It is, possibly, the green of one crumb of chlorophyll in a privet leaf seen through a microscope. But away from the computer screen, colours rarely appear as unmottled blocks of pigment. The sensitive human eye will never perceive green simply as #33CC33.

I am not complaining about the limitations of representing the extra-digital world through digital means. Through its simple function as a colour that that early PCs could reproduce, #33CC33 has reminded me of the non-digitally-reproducible experiences that I like to have as a person. Among them, it seems, is the experience of looking at things that are green.