Bill Ralston
Having your locks go grey is sad, but having hair at all is something to celebrate.
Ihave become a little slow in getting my hair cut. It is now as long as it was when I was 18, just after the Summer of Love crashed and burnt, and I was trying for a Jim Morrison vibe. These days, I’m not intentionally seeking the ageing hippie look – I just can’t be bothered dashing into a hairdresser’s salon every month for a new coiffure and half an hour of idle chatter.
I’m not worried about long hair looking effeminate, because I notice there’s a trend for celebrity women to opt for the buzz cut that I’ve abandoned. I’ve seen photographs of a lovely actress/model whose name I can barely spell let alone pronounce, Cara Delevingne, with a very pretty silver crew cut. Another actress, Kristen Stewart, who most famously played Bella Swan in the Twilight Saga films, has a similar blondish No 2 cut. Actually, now that I think about it, both women are bisexual and maybe they’re making some kind of gender statement with their exposed scalps, but I do think short hair looks great on women.
Urchin or pixie cuts have been around for many years: Audrey Hepburn’s haircut was the classic of the genre. Actually, I’ve just been poring over the pages of a women’s magazine and I can cite as current examples Charlize
Theron, Emma Watson and Halle Berry, also actresses but they, I think, are heterosexual, and so they are unlikely to be making that gender statement.
Men, I’ve decided, look better with longer hair, especially me, as the back of my head looks like someone’s flattened it with a spade and a short back and sides really isn’t flattering at all for someone who lacks any skull curvature.
I have observed that at the first sign of baldness, a lot of men have simply shaved their head completely, making themselves look a little like professional wrestlers, which is a bit sad. Sadder still are the Windsor men, cursed by genetics, which means most of the blokes in the royal family have shed a lot of hair as they age. Even red-haired Prince Harry seems not to have missed on that bit of family DNA.
Those of us who have retained our locks must celebrate it, let the curls fall and the hair cascade, for we do not look like wrestlers but rather like the surviving remnants of a 60s rock band. The only problem is that my hair follicles have lost all their melanin and the mop is somewhat grey. Well, completely grey, actually.
I’m waiting for it to go a bleached white, at which point I will claim to be blond. The only downside of that is that I will not be allowed to grow a beard, because small children would call me Santa.
Weirdly, although my head hair is grey, other clumps of hair about my person continue to be dark brown. I won’t go into too much detail, but it is puzzling why my cranium lost its melanin but, for example, my legs are obviously swamped with gallons of the stuff. Maybe it all drained south from my skull to my feet.
The one thing I won’t do is dye it. It’s no use having your hairdo looking about 30 years old while your face looks 80. Young people, of course, look great with hair dyed purple, blue, pink and red, but they are young and they would probably look great even if they were bald.
I am attempting to grow old gracefully, so if you see me wandering about looking like a missing member of the Rolling Stones, do not laugh. Just quietly applaud.
It’s no use having your hairdo looking about 30 years old while your face looks 80.