Yesterday, I was very brave. I had my fringe cut back in by the wrong hairdresser. Not only was she not the one I’d booked (he was sick) but she was new to the salon. Oh, she had a list of credentials as long as your arm, but when you overhear her being told “And here’s where we keep the products”, directly before she wields a scissors in your general direction, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
But I had no choice. With a wedding in very, very soon-time, the colour and cut have to have settled. You know, like a blancmange or an old building, you have to allow for subsidance. There is always some – and I have a cow’s lick on the right temple that should more correctly be referred to as a buffalo lick. Feck that, it’s a camel snog. A mammoth gob. It stands up, tall and strong, before swooping back in on itself in a wave big enough to accomodate the entire casts of every Old Spice and Guinness commercial ever. I saw a white horse in there once. Knew I should have covered the greys.
It’s been fun not taming and training the cow’s lick for the last 10 or so months. It was great – with all the sweating and showering the marathon entailed – to let my extreme frizz dry naturally. But it always looked a bit rubbish. It never looked “done”. It never looked cool. I could have convinced anyone I felt like that I’d just returned from the set of Lost and they’d have believed me, but in the real world, I didn’t want to look like a castaway. I wanted, as someone put it, “an element of structure”. I’m not in control of much else; I may as well be happy with my hair.
So, while it’ll never look as sharp as it does right now, all smooth and shiny from the salon (the new girl was so wrong, she was right), I will at least be able to straighten the fringe and make it appear as if I’ve made a bit of an effort. I won’t have, but it’ll look that way. And that’ll do.
