Fifty Shades of Grey

Or…why the Leguevin baseball team is called the Duckies.

A story in a local free paper about the mighty Duckies.

Before we first moved to France, way back in ought-six, M’s British colleagues told how much we were going to enjoy the weather of Toulouse. “It’s so sunny,” they would enthuse. At the time, we didn’t realize that, for Brits, two days of sun per week is almost more than they can stand.

So, our first fall/winter here we were bummed out. “Where’d the sun go?” we wondered. For the next eight years, it was like the instructions on a shampoo bottle: lather, rinse, repeat. From November to April, it was the same thing.

Well, almost the same thing. You know how they say that Eskimos have more than a dozen words for snow, depending on the type of snow that’s falling? After waking up to yet another grey day, I went to meeting with my comms colleagues and I asked them, “Do Toulousains have multiple words for grey? You look up in the sky and it’s grey. Day after day. So are there different words for light-grey, dark-grey, grey with a hint of white, with a hint of black, with a patch of blue somehow visible, snow grey, rain grey, dark-turning-to-light grey?”

You can see that I’ve given this some thought. My colleagues assured me that Toulousains don’t have different words for all these variations. “It’s just a little cloudy,” they assured me. I also think they thought I was (am?) a bit nuts.

Anyway, this brings me back to the Leguevin Duckies baseball team. The team founder was an American expat who settled in the area and he must’ve thought the same as me about the weather. He told me that the first season the team played that it always seemed to rain. And who likes rain more than anyone? Ducks?

Editor’s Note: Today’s sky features a lovely light grey with bold streaks of white and patches of blue. Any suggestions on a name for it?