What I learned this week: The Perils of Boredom...

I might be confined to the house most of the time, but I am not short of things to do.  I have Masters coursework to work on, and two chapters I still haven’t looked at properly.  I have background reading to complete. I have the first few months of the Write Club monthly writing challenge to compose (it’s ironic that I haven’t yet contributed anything as I was one of the people begging for it to be brought back!).  I have what feels like a multitude of texts and emails to respond to, and phone calls to make. I have shelves full of books, half-watched dvd-boxsets, all the so-far-unwatched stuff on Amazon Prime. There is also housework, ironing, cooking, several household decoration jobs for which I actually have the materials necessary here in the house already.

Nagging my partner, P, takes up a large chunk of every day.

            So, why then did I decide to cut my hair a few days ago?  I was washing my hands in the sink in the downstairs toilet, which is the only room in the house that has a mirror low enough for me to see my whole head.  The bathroom mirror is just a tad too high so I have to stand on tiptoe and even then I can’t fully see my neck and chin without jumping.  There’s a full length mirror in our bedroom, but it’s in a dark corner behind the door because that’s the only place we could put it, and it’s extremely difficult to see yourself in it without squinting and having to find a torch. So, seeing my whole head without effort was quite a novelty, and I found myself considering my hair in a critical fashion.

               I have let it grow long for the past few years, though I usually wear it in a pony tail or, if I’m feeling glamorous, I twist it up in a hair-gripper-thingy.  I sometimes get the straighteners on it, but I think it looks better with its natural wave – straightened, it reminds me of one of those non-iron ‘pre-crumpled’ shirts that your mum has accidentally ironed.  I have bought several electrical items which have claimed to help people create gorgeous curls of various kinds easily at home, but none have proven satisfactory.  The heated curlers made me look like Shirley Temple, a look not recommended in the middle-aged.  The heated brush, resembling a World War 2 German hand grenade according to P, is unwieldy and I am constantly dropping it.  I find it impossible to use the Mark Hill curling wand, despite watching Youtube demonstrations, as I just can’t get my hair to stay put long enough to set into a curl.

               So, I thought, gazing at my reflection.  I could make it look a bit different by cutting off a few inches and making it into a shoulder-length bob. I mean, how hard could it be?  First problem was that I couldn’t be arsed to go upstairs to get my sharp hairdresser-type scissors, so I decided to use the kitchen scissors – these are huge and designed to cut meat.  P refers to them as ‘the chicken scissors’ which always makes me imagine they are made of chicken bones and sinew, a kind of hideous witch’s torture implement.  They have a little spring on them which sometimes pops out of its housing rendering the blades unusable. Needless to say, this happened frequently while I was hacking at my hair – on one occasion the spring sprang away and landed in the (fortunately clean) toilet pan so I had to fish it out.  Making a mental note to remember to boil the scissors before I next cut up any meat with them, I gave them a quick rinse and continued. 

               The problem is, as anyone knows who has tried to cut their own hair, you get one side to a perfect length only to discover that the other side is a tad shorter.  Then of course, when you try to even them up, you end up making the first side too short, and then you realise it’s harder than you imagined cutting the back, so you call your partner in and ask if he could just cut a couple of inches in a straight line off the back, and he says:

               ‘With the bloody chicken scissors? Are you crazy?’ And you have to glare at him and tell him to just do it.  And of course he ends up cutting the back in a zigzag line so by this stage you look like a punk rocker who’s forgotten the orange hair dye.

              Then you think, Oh, I know what I can do! I’ll layer the hair that’s left – it will look 

fashionably straggly, like I intended it to have uneven lengths all along, once I get the hair-dryer round it.  But chicken scissors, though they cut off quite a lot of hair at a time, don’t do it very consistently. 

Look, let’s just say that after half an hour my hair didn’t look as good as it would have done if an actual hairdresser had done it, and leave it at that…

              

                ‘Anyway,’ I said, bravely, watching P trying to stop himself laughing. ‘No one important is going to see me. It isn’t like I have to go to work, is it? And the neighbours are used to me looking weird.’

               ‘I thought you were teaching your two private tutees tomorrow?’

               ‘Yeah, but not face-to-face. It’s online…’ 

               I realised what I was saying, just as P said: ‘They can see you on Skype, you know. It isn’t just one-way video.’

               So, that’s why I taught my two tutees while wearing a pink chiffon scarf round my head.  I’d considered wearing P’s old black woollen beanie but it made me look like I’d recently done a bank job, so I thought it was the wrong image.  I did try wearing the scarf in various stylish ways, such as tied in a bow round my blow-dried hair in a manner reminiscent of Molly Ringwald in Pretty In Pink (I looked more like Divine in Female Trouble), or in a kind of turban, a look which always looks fab on people like Jennifer Saunders but on me it just looked pretentious – possibly because I’m in South Yorkshire where women just don’t wear things like bright pink turbans. But in the end I wore it in the style of one of the older, more staid members of the royal family.  Utterly inappropriate when sitting indoors teaching a lesson, but I figured that with the headset and mic on top it would be barely noticeable…

               Fortunately, after an initial extremely slight widening of the eyes, my first tutee (a girl) seemed to just accept my appearance without comment, and my second (a boy) was too concerned about convincing me that he didn’t need any homework to pay any attention to his teacher’s head adornment.  I’m now considering making a feature of my headgear during the tutorials – maybe wearing a fedora one week, or a wimple, or a wizard’s hat, or chrysanthemums.  Just to see if they’d notice at all.