I had a small surprise this morning.
I looked in the mirror and was quite astonished to discover that I had gone grey in the night.
I rushed into the bedroom and asked Mark about it, but he just glanced up vaguely and said that I always looked like that.
Surprised, I skulked back into the bathroom and examined it anew.
There is a very lot of grey hair. Once I was a brown haired person. Then I was a brown haired person with some grey hair. Now I am becoming a grey-haired person with a few patches of brown. Skewbald, I believe it is called.
I contemplated dye, but I did dye my hair once and it is an unbelievable amount of faffing about. First of all it takes ages and ages, really ages, whilst you hang about with lumps of tin foil hanging off your head, as if you were a chicken drumstick plant. Then you spend two days peering into the mirror trying to decide if you really like it or not, and then by the third day the roots are starting to show. After a fortnight the whole world knows that you are a cheapskate who needs to get their hair dyed but can’t afford another sixty quid.
I have resigned myself to just having to put up with it. On reflection I decided that this would not be much of a hardship since I hadn’t really noticed it going grey anyway, it is usually quite dark when I look in the mirror. Anyway it is distinguished, or maybe that is just men.
We watched an Amazon film tonight that the august Daily Telegraph had said was about women’s issues. Obviously it was not about actual feminism, that would have been suffragettes and Germaine Greer, and probably reasonably sensible. In fact it was supposed to be about feminism because the men take their clothes off rather than the women.
This was not why we watched it, especially Mark. Even I have got long past the age where I want to watch films about men taking their clothes off. If I wanted to see a man without his clothes on Mark is having a shower as I write these very words, so you can tell how important it is. I have got grey hair now and this sort of thing is less interesting than it once was, even when I have been drinking.
I wanted to watch it because it had been billed as being Better Than A Game Of Thrones. We liked A Game Of Thrones very much, although I think it would be better if the writer had actually finished it. Also this had been reviewed in the newspaper, and was clearly a Current Event.
We do not have a television and so I was quite pleased to think that we would be at the forefront of Happening Things for once, how brilliant to be able to be part of the National Conversation. The rest of the world watches things like celebrities having dancing competitions, and old ladies baking cakes, and my father told me there was an interesting programme about men fixing things in their sheds.
We miss all of this and just have to try and remember how to shape our faces into interested expressions when other people go on about them. This is quite difficult. I quite like watching dancing of all kinds, but I cannot even begin to imagine why the television-viewing public might want to watch somebody baking a cake or faffing about in their shed. Even when we are doing these things ourselves we put story recordings on so that at least we have got something interesting to listen to.
Anyway, tonight we watched the Happening Amazon film serial thing. I have forgotten what it was called. Eternal Dribble, or something, I expect.
We watched the whole of the first episode, but it was an effort, because it was twaddle from beginning to end. We would not have watched that much if we had finished dinner a bit sooner, but we were eating and could not be bothered to switch it off and find something else.
It was about a remote village on a mountainside that was mysteriously completely ethnically diverse. Every possible racial type was represented there. It did not seem to have occurred to the film makers that after a few generations of living in their remote mountain village with no other genetic input, eventually everybody would start to become roughly the same colour, there or thereabouts, as all the distinctions blurred when the different groups married one another.
The village was largely populated by magical mysterious women who did a lot of drinking and carousing, but not much taking their clothes off. After a while a visiting magical mysterious woman, inexplicably followed everywhere by a Ninja, turned up. The remote village was raided by some creatures that I thought were called trollops but then weren’t, and the magical mysterious woman buzzed off taking with her an ethnically diverse group of young people for further adventures.
We will not be watching Episode Two.
We will carry on baking cakes and faffing about in the shed instead.
