Hairy

Lucy decided today that she would have her hair cut.

Her beautiful ginger hair, which she describes as strawberry blonde, came down almost to her waist. Oliver would sit and stroke it and twist it between his fingers whenever he had the opportunity, such as on long car journeys or in the cinema, until she got irritated and made him leave it alone.

Today she decided, after much agonising, that it had to go.

This is her GCSE year. She has got a whole host of things that she wants to do, and she had started to feel as though her hair was beginning to be a weight, holding her back, metaphorically as well as actually.

When we thought about it we thought that a lot of independent women  cut their hair short. Long hair needs washing and brushing and plaiting and care.

Also she had had enough of looking like a Disney princess, especially one who has got up late and not bothered with washing and brushing and plaiting but just gone directly to the coffee.

Today was the terrible day.

We all went into Kendal, because of back-to-school shoe shopping and Oliver being too tall for his trousers, except obviously Number Two Daughter, who said she would one hundred percent rather go back to bed.

The hairdresser was quite shocked. She said that it was beautiful hair, and we should donate it to the Little Princess Trust, which makes wigs for little girls whose hair has fallen out due to dreadful illnesses and chemotherapy. We thought this sounded like a lovely idea, except Oliver who had thought he might keep it.

She tied Lucy’s beautiful long hair back in a bobble and then one of the other girls filmed it whilst she snipped it off, and we gasped as the long, heavy tail of hair came away in her hand.

Lucy looked so lovely without it we were all astonished, and she shook her head from side to side and laughed in amazement at the lightness of her new self.

We took Oliver off to Marks & Spencer for the purchase of longer-legged school trousers whilst the hairdresser washed and styled Lucy’s remaining hair.

This is not on my list of top one hundred ways to spend an afternoon. It is somewhere behind having a dentist’s appointment and laying fibre glass insulation in a confined space.

We bought trousers and socks for Oliver, and tights for Lucy, but pyjamas were not a success. One of the problems about boarding school is that everything matters, like duvet covers and slippers, you can’t get away with dressing your child in last year’s worn ones with a hole in the bottom and a safety pin in the elastic. Every single garment is exposed to the critical eyes firstly of Matron, and secondly to dozens of other small boys who will all point out a pyjama top bearing the name of the wrong football team with great glee.

Both children need new pyjamas and duvet covers after a year of school laundry boiling. Oliver would like duvet covers with some cartoon figures from a bloodthirsty Japanese story he has been watching on his computer, called Attack on Titan. These are almost impossible to get, but can be ordered on Amazon from somewhere abroad for the token price of £67.30 plus international postage and tax.

I think we will give those a miss, not so much for the interesting price or even the vile pictures of Japanese bloodletting, but because they are made of a mixture of polyester and cotton with plastic press studs.

This combination distresses my natural-fibre aspirational middle class soul, but more importantly won’t last until Christmas in the school’s thoroughly determined laundry, which has got to get the consequences of several hundred small boys out of their bedding every week, and does it with grim effectiveness. I am always impressed with the results.

We went to collect Lucy, who looked stunningly different, grown up and sophisticated and lovely, and overjoyed with her new lightness of soul, how splendid to see her looking so happy.

I shall draw a kindly veil over our subsequent school-shoe trip to Clarks. Suffice to say, it left Mark’s wallet a great deal lighter, and left me pondering the dreadfulness of having a job in a school-shoe shop in August. It reminded me a bit of being a doorman on the local nightclub, you have got to not mind fighting and abuse and have a bit of a philosophical outlook.

We had planned to visit Asda after that, but by mutual agreement we took ourselves home.

There is only so much shopping a family can bear in one day.