A Few Insights From The Recent Snow Situation

1. Wearing a hat is brilliant for my awkward accidental mullet (caused by having too many pregnancies which results in partial baldness, leading to coy regrowth in a variety of hair types – could be grey, could be pube-ish, could be like a dark haired man’s, even). Admittedly, the regrowth does thicken up to become a underlying skull-cap layer which gives an appealing bouffant but then disappointingly runs out of volume and lies lank, thin, and broken. But my hat smooths out and flattens down the extra short bits like a cut-priceblow dry. It also seems to create a cheekbone illusion. As well as keeps your head warm. LATE TO THE HAT PARTY, OBVS. This segues neatly to another hair/scalp thing:

2. Lindsay at Aveda said I shouldn’t really wash my hair, so I haven’t been, even after a run. She says I need to use that sweat and oil to create hair creations, to give some volume, to power up the follicles and fool the world that I am young and lush. It does kind of work – I can do this sticking-up fringe thing a bit like my dad used to do, kind of brushed back into itself so that you see a slightly see-through wall of thin hair standing up, fortified by dirt – although by day four the product and oil joins the strands together and it can only be worked as a messy undo (pretty much exactly like Meghan Markle did so well recently, except for the different colour, hair type, length, degree of polish, health and age of the hair, recourse to expensive treatments and non-supermarket shampoo)  but then you can see my patches of psoriasis. I asked Mark the other day whether he ever sees my red scaly patches which lie behind my ears and around my hairline and he says

‘Yes.’ And I was a bit horrified because I thought I skilfully kept them hidden through tucking back long strands of hair, a bit of wishful thinking and quite a lot of hope. Apparently, people can see my visible patches of psoriasis because they are, well, visible.

So, hats.

3. Also, I fell over in front of a pub on Tuesday night. It was slo mo and sore, and a man rushed up to me to help me up and I felt like a big ungainly baby. I was wearing ankle boots with a flat leather sole. Mostly this is because I am no slave to English seasonal dressing – oh no, I like to be a little bit cold, always. Keeping things interesting, you know? No gloves for me, or shoes with grip. Just boots that slide over hard surfaces. And there have been many around, although I ran this morning and didn’t fall over, just got wet, cold and snotty. I succumbed to wellington boots today but don’t they make you look a bit farmer-ish? I bit thick-thighed? Quite ruddy? Ugh.

In Other News

I wrote this about feeling like yourself again after having a baby – it got some shares, so it’s here so you can see that I do write about things other than the unsatisfactory state of hair. Sheesh.

Also, I started a job on the copywriting team at Selfridges. This means I have to learn to write really fast (i.e. I can’t fanny about checking instagram every few minutes) and I have to go into the building three times a week, and I have to cope with being edited by other people, and I have to learn to enjoy my own company at lunchtime because while the young people on the team are very nice, they just don’t seem to see me, certainly not enough to ask me to have lunch with them, or, even, really talk to me at all.

I think this isn’t meanness, but because I am a generation older than they are, and so it makes me imperceptible to their youthful eyes. Like a forgettable aunt. Or their mother. Maybe one of their mother’s friends? Your mother’s friend who thinks she is young, insists on it, but you really know she is old. And she is a bit embarrassing. And maybe she swears a bit too much, jabbers on a bit, mostly to herself? I am trying really hard to be cool, and to calm that shit down, but it is really hard, because I love making new friends and I don’t think that I am SO SO SO very different from them all. But then I remember what I was like when I was in my early 20s when someone was friendly but old. I remember blanking them.

Also, they do say funny things, like not knowing the Tonya Harding story, and not ever hearing the word ‘brutalism’ before. But some of them are my bosses. I haven’t mentioned the word ’40’ yet because I think I will actually disappear. I will become transparent. I will be their flesh and blood blind spot.

So, I am going to dress like a mental when I am not there, to console myself that I can make people look. I wore this to dinner at The Landau Hotel last Friday. It is a full skirted 70’s polyester dress. I wore it with red boots and I tripped up on the hem. It requires that underwear that sucks your stomach in and up, so it spills a little into your rib-area – not far enough to give you bigger boobs, just a lower, smaller tube of under-boob. You know?

And then one night a few weeks ago I placed a bid on this vintage Chanel necklace and I won it. Ostensibly to sell on, but then, JUST LOOK! If only it wasn’t too cold to wear boat neck tops. If only it wasn’t bloody hat weather.