it’s time i faced it

I went out for a bit of frippery yesterday.  I’ve been working my arse off for the last couple of months (some films for a merkan corporate giant and illustrating, amongst other things, today’s 2000th edition copy of Única in Expresso) and I needed to get out of the house, away from my drawing tablet and into some shoe shops.

It’s only shoes that I ever feel comfortable buying.  I go in.  I like, I don’t like.  I try on.  I buy or I don’t.  I bought two pairs.  I have quite a few shoes.  All that pleasure that I’m supposed to find in the other lady stuff eludes me, though.

I wandered round some clothes shops yesterday and didn’t even get to the usually depressing part of trying things on, because everything was just awful.  There seem to be two distinct “fashion” “trends” this “season” (you sense my disdain?).  One is the preppy naval look in a cheap nasty red, navy blue and white which would grant me the look of Hyacinth Bucket on a yacht.   The other is flowery, insipid, beige and pink and baby blue diaphenous polyester trying to emulate that late seventies rustic-gypsy-flake-ad look, with shapes that make anyone with boobs Demis Roussos shaped and colours that make me look like I died last week and make me depressed.

I have only ever made myself sick once from eating too much.  It was those pink wafers we had in the seventies.  I ate a whole packet, and when I puked them up, the toilet bowl was filled with pink vomit.

That’s what most of the spring season reminded me of yesterday.  Pink sick.  With bits in.

Then I went to have a haircut.

I went into an international chain of hairdressers (no, not that one… I can’t afford that one).  I felt like a lemon.  That’s what hairdressers do to me.  They make me feel like a lemon.  I look around and all these other women look happy to be there, or worse, entitled to be made to look better having their stupid manicures.

I wonder, aren’t I supposed to feel like I’m supposed to be here yet?  Is it a grown up thing?  When will I grow up?  Because I hope it’s soon, because I’m feeling very uncomfortable standing here in the reception of a large hair salon, surrounded by Portuguese women who were born to spend a shit load of money on having their nails and hair done every week.

I was ushered to a chair by a woman in her fifties, dressed in regulation black, as skinny as a broom, who wants to explain to me that their hygiene practices are second to none… or rather, that everything is disposable.   This is my hairdresser, I thought.  She had a typical sub-prime-tia hairdo… the kind of exploding puffed out thing with highlights that have gone beyond just the high and have gone low, the kind of hairdo you will find on the owner of an overpriced “fashion boutique” in a small town in England.  If this is my hairdresser, I thought, I hope she’s not expecting to do a big dried out mess of a hairdo on my like she’s got on hers.  A second after the hygiene lecture (20 seconds long) was done a second woman (woman… she looked about sixteen) arrived behind me.  Her hair looked like someone had placed a dead badger on her head.

“I’ve told her about the hygiene” said the older one.

“What can we do for you today, then?” asked the younger one.  She was my hairdresser, then.

I explained.  I just wanted a bit of a trim, but as it hasn’t been cut for almost a year… (they looked pityingly at me) that she could cut off as much as she wanted.  It is only hair, I reminded them both.  It grows back.  They both looked at my hair.  “Nice colour” said one.  “Where did you get it done?”

“It’s a bottle from the supermarket” I said.  They did disappointed faces at me and only then started lifting up my hair to find the bits I’d missed.  It seems they found what they were looking for and nodded at each other, confirming its holiness and its dryness. It’s only hair, I reminded them.  I had my hair coloured (coloured… I mean bleached, but you’re apparently not allowed to say that anymore) once by a hairdresser and he left a hole the size of Wales in my scalp (actually, I can’t complain.  I enjoyed pulling the scabs out through my hair for the following week… oh to be sixteen again).

“Oh, and I need you to tidy up my fringe, please…. it got a bit long and I chopped it off in a hurry and it’s a bit wonky.”  They shook their disappointed heads at me.  …. Cutting hair when you haven’t been to haircut school!  Can you imagine?  I have this one sided conversation with hairdressing harpies every eight or so years when I finally get round to forcing myself into a salon.  The reason I only make appointments every eight or so years (this time, only ten months, is something of a personal best) is because I am so profoundly bored by this conversation.  I cut my own hair.  I admit it.  And if I hadn’t said anything you wouldn’t have known.  You harpy.  It is only hair.  And YOUR hair looks like someone has placed a dead badger on your head, so do you really feel you can look disappointed at me?

I had my hair washed and as I slid down the chair, suspended by my neck from the sink, I could only see the mirror across from me, in which stood the skinny boy apprentice with a girl’s voice (young gay boys in my day did not all have girls’ voices… when did that happen?) who was supposed to be learning to wash hair  but instead preened and pouted in the mirror, reshaping his wildly awful asymmetric do with a fringe that glanced across one eye so that the slightest movement caused it to go IN his eye.  I could feel their eyes burning into my unwaxed face, unmade up eyes and quite dry hair and they giggled, probably not at me, but it was still annoying. I felt like throwing a shoe at their heads.  But I was suspended by the neck from a sink and swaddled in disposable towels and gown…. and couldn’t reach a shoe.

She cut my hair.  and it was ok.  I left swiftly.  I didn’t belong in there.

Next was the bra shop, which left me with the same “I don’t belong here” feeling, especially when told by a flat chested twelve year old assistant that I was an E cup (I am NOT an E cup).

All this discomfort in the face of ladyhood perplexes me.  Aren’t I a grown up?  Aren’t I supposed to be able to just do all this stuff now?

I am hurtling towards 41, and I think that I really ought to stop waiting to grow up.  I always thought I might wake up one day and would feel like a grown up, that I would be able to walk into a hairdresser’s without wanting to be swallowed by the hairy floor, that bra-shopping would be fun, that I’d find that I COULD wear diaphenous frilly clothes.  I would grow a work ethic regarding the laundry and all that shit.  I would  do the tax returns willingly and on time, I would have lost my double chin (for this is surely puppy fat), I would be skinny (for this is also surely puppy fat), that the bump on the end of my nose would have miraculously disappeared, and I would have a long neck.  And I could wear anything I pleased without feeling bad about what the silly other people think.  Even a fish-shaped-fascinator on my forehead.

But it’s not going to happen, is it?