Zoom helped me discover the bald facts about life in lockdown...
ONE of the hugely unexpected consequences of spending so long in lockdown is that the balding process has accelerated faster than a Bugatti Veyron. I didn’t really notice at first, because what’s left of it has been growing at record speed and I’ve had to trim it three times in ten weeks to stop it from getting too unruly.
That much I can do with an electric trimmer, and I haven’t really bothered snipping it on top because I don’t really trust myself with a scissors in the mirror; every time I think I’m making a move left, it’s right, and when I try to move forward, it’s back.
As it turns out, I didn’t really have to trim the top anyway. I was on Zoom with the family one night and dropped something, and when I bent to pick it up, there were audible gasps. ‘What?’ I asked.
‘You’ve lost lots of hair,’ my elder sister said, before adding, terrifyingly: ‘You’ve got Dad’s head.’
Now my father’s hair grew all his life in the places it chose to, but there was a large part of his pate that ultimately became more arid than the Atacama Desert. Looking at him from the front, you’d never know, but the bird’s eye view wasn’t great. So when the Zoom finished, I held my iPhone a foot above my head and snapped it – and nearly expired quietly of the shock. Where once there was what my mother would have called a luxuriant kink – and I never tried to explain the modern meaning of the word – there are now just a few miserable strands.
The game, I fear, is up. I either take a No.2 blade to my entire head, or I enter the sad combover era of my life. Or maybe I just leave the front as it is, accept that I now officially have a proper bald spot and, with a bit of Brylcreem, close the curtains so no-one notices the stage is bare.
AN RTÉ news report on Sunday night about how animals are faring in our new world opened with footage of an urban fox strolling up Grafton Street with the insouciance of Noel Purcell on his Dublin saunter.
Just as the fox hit centre screen, a title below said the journalist was Jackie Fox. Nominative determinism is a cod science that suggests people develop interests or are attracted to certain jobs because of their own names. In this instance, though, maybe Jackie always wanted to work on fox news.
MY English nephew and I were talking about novels at the weekend and I mentioned that Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier was one of my favourites – and that’s the title it always was sold under in English, too. Afterwards, I went on Amazon and ordered it for him, and it arrived next day. In French... Always double-check before clicking ‘buy’ because I had to do so again. It is now known in English either as The Lost Domain or The Lost Estate, though forever more I will think of it simply as The Lost Tenner.
CATCHING up with an old friend last week, she told me she once asked a pal how long it took to get from Dublin to Belfast on the Enterprise train.
His answer? ‘Five cans of Dutch Gold.’ I’m still laughing.