I need a hair cut. I’ve never settled on anything that can be described as a style, it’s more a damage limitation exercise whenever I have asked anybody brave enough to tackle it with sharp implements. An unruly mass of curly mayhem that grows outwards as well as in length, my hair seems to have a personality of its own; along with it, it has deep-seated issues that stem from it being back-combed and attacked with “thinning scissors” by my mum when I was a child.

In a world where straight hair rules, there are some of us who just have to submit to our curls and let them do their thing. This became apparent to me when I was nineteen when I was fortunate enough to have free access to decent stylists and stolen styling products from one of Headingley’s best salons.

Since those days when I cared somewhat about my appearance, my hair has simply become something that just is. Despite numerous attempts at finding a stylist who can read my mind and visualise how I want it to look, I generally come away from a salon feeling annoyed and looking like Elaine Paige. As a result of my phobia of hairdressers, my locks are now very long and very out of control.

My locks are also taking over my house, my vacuum cleaner, my bathroom floor and, more disgustingly, the plug hole in my bath. Most people will have found themselves in the situation where the bath doesn’t drain particularly well during their shower and discovered that the plug hole is a matted mass of hair and solidified soap and this happened to me last weekend. I decided to tackle it after a bottle of wine and on reflection this was the best course of action. The initial attempt at clearance involved trying to pick out the tangled mass with my fingers, but it had woven itself into the structure of the metal. This prompted a bit of poking around with cotton buds, which released the majority of the gunk. The final resort was concentrated sodium hydroxide gel. Or maybe that was the first course of action that couldn’t penetrate anything because of the industrial strength keratin component of my hair, cemented in place by solidified bathing products. Anyway, playing about with harmful chemicals while drunk should be left to those with a science background, that’s for sure.

Housework
Of all the household chores, cleaning the bathroom is my least favourite, mainly because of the persistent hair/fluff/dust combination that simply gets moved around the room during the activity. Then there’s the grout that harbours little patches of black mould and that hideous orange staining that results from hair shampoo. And I can’t reach the tiles to clean them above a certain height. The shower screen doesn’t open outwards all the way… basically because a man fitted it… so I have to get into the bath to clean it and then I get Jif/Cif all over me and it’s just fucking horrible.

The whole thing just makes me want to go and live in a cave where you don’t need to bother washing and you can use a corner of the place as a toilet. Or France, as it’s otherwise known.