I have a daughter with purple hair.
This is not an entirely new experience as both of her grown-up sisters have had interesting colours and shapes of hair at various times, not to mention tattoos and studs in various facial features, and I am coming to accept that the wish to look peculiar is simply a normal, if inexplicable, function of approaching adulthood.
Actually, it isn’t at all bad really. I took her to my very splendid hairdresser in Kendal to have it done because it is a bit like getting a tattoo, if you must do it then you have got to get it done really, really well, and in fact what his very nice colourist sensibly did was come up with something that pleased us both.
She has trimmed her hair and made it look beautifully silky and tidy, and then dyed bits of it, at the ends. It is nicely pink, but not dreadfully so, and actually manages to look rather well groomed and exotic. She is delighted with it, and Mark hardly noticed, and so the problem is solved, she has had a teenage rebellion and we are all happy with the outcome. She can go off to the Ardeche with her friends and toss her well-groomed purple-pink mane until every Liverpudlian Borstal inhabitant with a canoe is head over heels in love with her, except I suspect she is quite likely to spurn them all when she realises that their joint income is unlikely to keep her in manicures and lipstick.
It appears that she has also changed her name to Lulu. I found this out when I noticed that it was printed on the sleeve of her jersey. “What’s a Lulu?” I wondered, stupidly, before light dawned.
We had a nice trip into Kendal together. I tried, and failed, to impress her with my easy fluency in young people’s speech, in the hideously embarrassing way that parents do from time to time. All that was truly missing was an audience of her friends as I tried my luck with “Talk to the elbow, dude, because the face ain’t listenin’,” which I thought was a huge success, as she could barely control her horror.
Having thus updated our relationship with all the mother-daughter bonding things that we usually miss out on whilst she is at boarding school it has been a splendid day. She has taken it upon herself to assist in divesting Oliver of his fairly persistent ignorance during the holidays, and has done absolutely astonishing work so far. Quite apart from his now knowing what three sevens are, they have spend a lot of today practising spelling and French whilst we were at work.
Regular readers will understand that I have got mixed feelings about the former at least, I suspect that it is only his truly dreadful spelling that prevents him from accessing all sorts of unsuitable rubbish on the Internet. As soon as he can reliably spell ‘hot blonde babes’ then I imagine that his computer will just self combust.
However his sister is unconcerned with this, and has drawn up a programme of lesson plans, and when I left her tonight she was busy writing up tomorrow’s handwriting practice. If he does not get to Eton it will not be Lucy’s fault.
It is so nice to have them home. Harry came round after he finished school, and once again the house reverberated to the happy sounds of exploding zombies. At Oliver’s bedtime I could catch up with the continuing saga of the exciting adventures of somebody called Percy Jackson, and we all walked the dogs together in the rain before work this evening. The kitchen has a homely, familiar smell of pizza and chocolate spread and sausages and apple juice, instead of just coffee and dogs as it did when we were alone. There are shoes absolutely everywhere, and a massive stack of untouched luggage lurking in the loft waiting for me to feel brave enough to tiptoe up and challenge it.
I am not quite that brave yet, although I am guiltily aware that I will have to venture up to it very soon indeed, because Lucy is going to have to repack for her holiday next week, and so far I have hardly washed anything.
Tomorrow…
