Hair! How I waved (goodbye to) mine!

If you look very carefully at my one and only photo,( don't ask me why, I can't explain why no other photos are available when I 'browse') you will notice green stuff growing out the top of my head and my lug-holes. I did say that you have to look carefully! Anyway, I'm sure that has very little to do with this posting, so read on.

HAIR

My muse made a re-appearance early this morning and she started me thinking about hair. Not the seventies musical which I never saw, but in which I believe, is where they started flashing the pubic variety on stage for the first time. Also not about the male fruit of my loins who is the unfortunate son and heir to the Skellern Throne(s), we have two, if you’re really interested in that sort of thing, let’s say you’re a distant relative of Thomas Crapper, for instance.

But, I’m digressing for a change! What my muse was thinking about, were the cilia like things that grow from follicles on the skin of many critters, including mammals and in this case I’m talking about human critters.

A lot of human critters are born with hair, usually on their heads, but in my case apparently I was born covered from head to toe in cilia. This caused a certain amount of speculation among the doctors and midwives who were present, that they had just observed the birth of ‘The Missing Link’.

Perhaps fortunately, I suffered from this abundantly hirsute appearance for a mere matter of moments, or at the very most days, before returning to a normal, cherub-like appearance. This relieved and pleased my parents enormously, when they eventually removed the swaddling clothes.

In my youth I had a very healthy head of hair accompanied by a surfeit of dandruff, as readers of my well-acclaimed autobiography will no doubt remember. Thinking about this now, the dandruff and my subsequent follicular problems may well have the same root cause (if you’ll pardon the pun). That is carbolic soap, in those far off days, the family budget did not stretch to Lux soap, let alone Two-in One daily Shampoo and Conditioner for soft manageable hair.

In fact, we considered ourselves lucky, that Dad didn’t bring back buckets of industrial strength cleaner with added grit to get rid of those unwanted oil and grease stains. Half the kids in the neighbourhood suffered from impetigo and other unwanted skin diseases, as a result of getting their epidermises scrubbed away. It isn’t surprising that the more elderly, chattering class of Poms have a phobia about bathing, (You can include me in there).

Anyway, to get back to the original topic, which seems to have been lost somewhere along the way. It’s amazing that the older you get, the easier it is to get sidetracked by inconsequentialities. (There’s a bloody good example for you, I typed in that word, and the Comp Spell check tells me it should be with y’s so I change it and the Comp Grammar tells me to change it back). I must admit that if a dog year equals 7 human years, a computer year must equal at least 10 human years, which makes this mongrel machine 150 years old at least. So who am I to complain?

Back to hair, thank Elliot! (See ‘Fosterarianism’). In my early middle age (late 20’s) my head hair started to turn grey, so much so, that a ‘well meaning’ friend bought me a bottle of ‘Grecian 2000’. No apologies to the makers of this crap, because, although my hair did initially darken. When I went outside on a normal hot, sunny, Australian summer’s day, my hair started to smell uncannily like burning rubber and took on a distinctive greenish tinge. I took this as a bad omen and threw the rest of the bottle where it belonged.

After that, I let nature take it’s course, my pate got larger and larger (or at least that’s how it appeared in the mirror). My hair turned greyer and greyer, not a lovely sort of snowy white, like, say Santa Claus. Or take Bobawk, well you can’t really, because Blancmange Applejet has already done that. But metaphorically speaking, Bobawk has a beautiful head of wavy white hair, the fact that he has a face as wrinkled as a GPS photo of the South Dakota Badlands, is neither here nor there.

My hair, what’s left of it, is a sort of nondescript salt and pepper, with a lot more pepper than salt. You’ve got blondes and brunettes and the poor sods with mousy hair that’s me with grey streaks. You also have redheads of course, which is also me, ‘no hair just a red head’. To quote another hairy, old chestnut, ‘I used to have wavy hair until it waved goodbye’. Shit! I wish I hadn’t written that.

These days in late middle age (late 50’s) I’ve decided to take extreme measures. I decided to grow my eyebrows to extreme lengths and brushing them back over my forehead, this has an effect like the reverse of a widow’s peak, think about it!

I gave that idea away, because it looked fairly stupid and after I had one of my infrequent showers, using two in one shampoo/conditioner, my eyebrows hung down softly over my eyes, making me look like a rather pathetic, doleful Old English Sheepdog. Not a look I particularly wished to cultivate.

Since then, I have shaved off the insides of the eyebrows and waxed the outer bits into a sort of Salvador Daliesque moustache like creation. This gives me a slightly puzzled and much more satanic effect. Far preferable to a miserable, bloody hound and with careful use of a shower-cap, also sustainable.

I have also cultivated my nasal hairs so that they split either side of my mouth and tied them under my chin; this gives the effect of a goatee beard, but makes chewing rather difficult. I have also neglected to mention the hairs sprouting out of the ears; these used to be subtly dealt with at the hairdresser’s using teensy, dinky little electric razors. When you stop going to have a haircut, as happens, these little beauties sprout rather luxuriantly and are also self-waxing, no hair gell or brylcreem for these suckers. Ask Kevin Rudd if you don’t believe me.

But the piece de resistance is the ponytail, what we balding baby boomers do, is to pull the hair at the sides of the tonsure as tightly as possible, (without pulling it out of course), into a single plait at the base of the neck. This has the immediate effect of tightening up the skin on your face, getting rid of those unsightly wrinkles. There is the unfortunate side effect of making your eyes like slits and if taken too far, can make you temporarily blind.

Over a period of years, (not hours or days here, you need a modicum of patience in all these hirsute preparations) you will end up with a pigtail (Queue) a Chinaman would have been proud of in the Tang Dynasty. Stretching from the base of your neck down to your gluteus maximal cleavage (Bum crack to the hoi polloi). Once you reach this exalted state you can then proceed to the next stage.

The next stage, being to curl the pigtail round and round on top of your head, giving anybody stupid enough not to see through your subterfuge, (which accounts for approximately 97% of the world’s population), the impression that you have a full head of hair. Once you achieve this state, you have two choices, either to staple the pigtail to your head, which can be a tad on the painful side, or alternatively use the modern day equivalent of Brylcreem (Gel) and plaster said queue to your pate.

If you choose the latter, beware, if you venture out into a force nine gale, your pigtail will be whipping and cracking like a bullwhip. This can have an adverse effect on other pedestrians and cause them to panic. With your demonic eyebrows, tied nasal hairs, ear hairs sticking out horizontally and pigtail cracking. This could cause little old ladies, waiting patiently to cross the road, to throw caution to the wind, hoist their walking frames aloft and skip nimbly between speeding cars and trucks, the boggle minds!

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com