Well, here we all are, clinging to the last vestiges of normality and striving to be positive.
In this compulsory period of purdah, I do hope lady readers, that you’re showered, dressed and fully made up, not slobbing about in your jim-jams? Gentlemen, do we find you stubble chinned in an elderly tee-shirt and baggy jogging bottoms? Shame on you.
These are challenging days. Psychological studies prove that in times of stress, good personal grooming boosts the morale – and certainly that of the people who have to look at you, i.e. your nearest and dearest. Don’t you remember in your courting days how you always strove to look your best for each other? What happened?
I’m managing well – from the neck down. It’s the hair that’s depressing me. With the recent withdrawal of professional services, we salon regulars are like lost souls. (For those of you thinking that, in the current climate, this is a frivolous issue, ask any woman whose hair isn’t the colour she was born with and she will swiftly disabuse you.) And who, in their right mind would take scissors to their own hair? To say I have ‘no hands for hair’ is a tragic understatement. Having put my coiffure in the professional care of Jackie (Tuesdays) and Marie (Fridays) for more years than I care to remember, I’m in dire straits – one might say ‘astray in the head’.
Home hairdressing is too steep a learning curve for me. Having the products is only part of the solution. The end result depends on training and technique. Possession of the tools of the trade and the expertise to use them are both notably absent from my skill-set. Daughter Dear, living at a distance, insists there’s an ancient hairdryer somewhere in the house which she neglected to take when leaving home – sixteen years ago. My friend Anne keeps her second-best straighteners in my spare room for use on her frequent visits. Finding the first and learning how to use the second is a task I keep postponing by sleeping propped up against four pillows to prevent denting the last professional ‘do’. But the root of the problem (and that of many women,) is my roots. Already, you could run four lanes of traffic down my parting. I’ve bought a ‘root re-toucher’ which smells like something you’d spray on damaged car panels, but you need to have an accurate aim and you can’t see what you’re doing round the back.
Women are obsessed with their hair. Never content with what nature has given them, they’ve been fiddling with it since time immemorial. Renowned historical beauty Lucrezia Borgia was reputed to wash her hair in pig’s urine to preserve its unusual colour. We’re bombarded on-screen by a plethora of mercifully more fragrant products, peddled by irritating ads featuring drop dead gorgeous models swishing and flicking manes of lustrous locks like show ponies. Often the domestic results fall disappointingly short of the promise on the packet, but that’s probably down to the ineptitude of the novice user.
Nothing catalogues a woman’s hair history more accurately than a quick flick through old photographs. Prepare to be embarrassed. Here we are in childhood, suffering the torture of ringlets or the tautness of plaits. Squirm with mortification at the adolescent class photograph, when every day was a ‘bad hair’ day. There you are in the 70s, peering through mournful curtains; in the 80s, looking as if you’d stuck your finger in an electric socket. Victims all, of fickle fashion the great dictator and meekly adopting the contemporary hairstyle in vogue, even if we didn’t have the face for it. What were we thinking?
Reunions too can be a salutary shock. Nobody’s hair is the colour you remember it and the quiet mousey ones whose names you’ve forgotten exude a new mature glamour. Only the bravest or least vain have, like Elsa in ‘Frozen’, let it go.
I’m stepping into the shower shortly with my rescue root remedy, shade ‘Sahara Gold’, the application instructions learned by heart, hoping to emerge restored to glory. Wish me luck….
