Clever Old Dames

Okay so this week went by in a flurry and before I knew it Friday was here and I was all kerfuffled. And my hair! This entire week has been a hair event from hell. I love a short choppy style, easy and no mess no fuss and cannot see wood from trees to get an appointment to have it cut any time in the near future. So guess what? Being a hoarder of old magazines and postcards has its advantages. Somewhere in my magic box of tricks I remembered seeing an article about hair-do's written in the forties. You guessed it, how to cut your own hair was a big thing during the war and if those frugal old dames could get it right during a blitz, why couldn't I? Why not indeed.

I have all the advantages; alligator clips from my GHD kit, bright lights and very sharp scissors and almost perfect vision with my glasses on. Add to this no interruptions from air raid sirens, falling mortars or rabid gestapo and my chances of success were much much better than my predecessors.

I set up shop in my bathroom and laid all my equipment out carefully. About 7 seconds into my preparations, I realised that my dress making scissors were much too big and much too clumsy for the job. This sent me scouting through the boys bedrooms for any other sharpish scissors that would do the trick. My eldest came to the rescue with a lovely pair of bright orange scissors with a classy Ben 10 motif on the sides. Perfect.

Preparations now complete I notice I had attracted an audience of 2 small boys, 2 kittens and Victor the Mutt. All in my very small bathroom. Victor was the only one smiling at this stage in that vacuous way of dogs complete with his tongue lolling and tail wagging. The kids on the other hand were wide eyed with anticipation and my eldest in his sage way voicing his concern at the sensibility of this latest foray into haute coiffure.

Let me add at this point that my preparations did not actually involve finding said article on how to do this. No! I relied on my perfect recall for all facts trivial and was absolutely dead sure I remembered each and every step verbatim.

I began by wetting my unruly mop and combing it through into neat rows on my head. The article said (and I am sure of this) to section the head into quarters and then twist each section into a bunch and cut through at even lengths. This I did, repeatedly, all over my head until I resembled a startled hedgehog. So far so good.

By now my audience was in disarray. The kittens were eating my shorn locks, Victor was asleep and the kids were once again falling about laughing and pointing. It is at this stage that I started to worry about texture and decided to add a new millennium twist to my new found hairdressing talent. Taking each clump of newly lopped hair in one hand and the Ben 10 scissors in the other, I proceeded to chop into the top of each clump to give definition and texture to the cut. Clearly I was still on a roll.

Then for the moment of truth. I ran my hands through my hair to separate the clumps and see the final result and discovered I had given myself not the perfect Sixties Pixie sported by Hepburn et al, but a perfect trailer park Mullet!

Back to the drawing board I went, this time working on the back of my head and without glasses which kept getting in the way. This of course reduced visibility forward to near zero and despite my kids total belief to the contrary, the eyes in the back of my head were seriously out of order. Being the trooper I am I however persevered and I have to say the outcome is not half bad.

I did wake up this morning wondering if I would have to make up a story about the hamsters going nuts in the night to my long suffering (properly trained and qualified) hairdresser but no; my Pixie is perfect. With the right amount of moulding mud, texture goo and wet look gel, you can't see any sign that the Do is DIY at all and I am righteously proud of my new locks.

Clever old Gals those war brides.