As we enter another phase of national life so bleakly alarming that watching the news makes my face cave in like the Halloween pumpkin I haven’t got around to binning yet, would you like to hear a trivial problem? Perhaps you have a microscopic violin that needs airing? That’s rhetorical: tune up that tiny fiddle – I am having a bad hair day.
It’s more like a bad hair month, actually, ever since I washed my new wig. I have alopecia and one major advantage of the condition is that I have dodged hair styling for 20 years. Once cut, my wig goes on my head every morning and just behaves.
Sadly, wigs do not behave for ever: they, too, go bald. This autumn I was reduced to elaborate combovers to hide bald patches and desperately WhatsApping my hairdresser, who, since we first met, has, inconsiderately, become stratospherically successful.
He finally squeezed me and my new wig in last month. Mesmerised by his unbroken flow of juicy anecdotes and deft cutting, I concurred enthusiastically when he lifted the fringe speculatively, saying, “Let’s try it a bit longer, Em.” It looked great: there’s a reason he’s so in-demand after all. I left delighted, finally presentable without a woolly hat.
Swiftly thereafter, however, things went downhill. The wig has way more hair than I am used to, and requires maintenance I’m unqualified to provide. If I smooth the fringe, I look like Kurtan Mucklowe from This Country; if I let it have its own way, I become Miss Babs from Acorn Antiques. I’ve tried using straighteners, but the sound and smell of my hair sizzling are terrifying. I probably need a hairdryer, but the tiny travel one I use on my chickens on wet days is useless.
My hairdresser is now away coiffing someone on a beach in Mustique; I’m in Superdrug, dithering over “clay” versus “serum”. I suppose the wig will settle down eventually, once I have broken its spirit. Until then, I’m probably one of the few people who are delighted safe socialising is moving outside, so can be conducted in a beanie.
