Poorly Hair

I have a constant battle with my hair.  There is a sweet spot of about a day and a half after my hair has been cut when I am happy with it.  For the rest of the time, it is just a nightmare.  Which wouldn’t really bother me too much, after all I don’t have to look at it for the majority of the time, except that it doesn’t just not look good, it looks like a total mess.  I have hair which is very similar to a guinea pig’s, all swirls and sticky up bits.  Unfortunately for me there aren’t any rosettes available for humans who have wild hair.

What my hair looks like in the morning, and afternoon, and evening.

Mostly now I am resigned to the fact that my hair is never going to rival David Beckham’s.  It will never really have a style, the only way I am going to turn heads with my hair is if someone gets their glasses caught in it.  And that’s fine, really, I can cope with it, after all, with a physique like mine who needs great hair?

It's like we were separated at birth

EPA/Landov

Every now and then, however, people expect you to dress up a bit, put in a bit of effort and, most of all, do your hair so that you aren’t going to be mistaken for the bush that surrounds the hall.  This weekend was such an event.  My Grandma’s 90th birthday was held at the Unicorn Hotel in Gunthorpe.  It was great, relations from Canada were over, people I hadn’t seen for probably 15 years were met again, and my hair was regimented to within an inch of its life.  With a combination of blood, sweat and enough hair gel to provide a spare venue for the Olympic rowing competition, (although conditions might be a bit slicker than they are used to), I managed to bully the spiky bits into a temporary truce  for the duration of the fun.  And, if I say so myself, I didn’t look like a total mess, and really, what more can you ask.

This is not really the point of the story however.  You see, having gone and got the gel, it is now sitting in the bathroom just waiting to be used, and so I have been using it.  My hair doesn’t know what’s hit it and is taking every opportunity to rebel but I thought I was just about winning the contest.   Until my daughter got involved.  Clearly she fancies herself as a critic and is just trying out different arenas in which she can inflict humiliation.  Also clearly she has decided that daddy is going to be her test subject.  We were just hanging out, I was laying on the floor, she was climbing me (one of her favourite games is to just shout ‘climbing daddy’ and wait for me to give her the opportunity to cause me pain by digging her arms and legs into me (which leads me to ask whether there is anything quite so sharp in all the world as a young child’s elbow, why they don’t use them to help with drilling for oil I don’t know.))  It was at this point, as she was climbing me, that she suddenly grabbed my hair, looked at me with two very sad eyes and said, ‘daddy hair poorly, daddy hair poorly.’ 

Talk about a crushing blow.  I’m not sure that my ego can stand the constant beating that it has been getting recently.  Clearly though my hair does not meet the daughterly standard, although she does need to work on her delivery, I’m not sure ‘daddy hair poorly’ is going to result in her own newspaper column, well, maybe with the Daily Mail.