Part of getting older is realising you are unable to marshall your corporeal flesh and fibres as authoritatively as you used to. Tissue and hair can no longer be relied upon to keep their old stations, but instead are seizing areas where they previously had no business being.
Yesterday I found a rogue hair – one could panic and call it a whisker, but I'm trying to give up being the panicking kind – on what I can only describe as my cheek. Somewhere beneath my skin, a maverick follicle had decided to break cover and start its very own sideburn several centimetres from its former comrades – or as I like to call them, my actual hair.
I don't spend a lot of time looking at my own face. There's some room for improvement and I have neither the time or the money to put the work in. However I look at it often enough to attain the conventional hygiene standards necessary to hold down regular work, and a little more often besides. But I did not see this one coming. It perhaps crept up on me during a swift and deadly night-time ageing exercise. Certainly, stealth was employed.
I am channelling the spirit of the Blitz though. Things could be worse. I could have found it on the end of my chin, or protruding from my nose, or nestling in what I optimistically call my cleavage. And I will fight. I may have given up on being ID'd in shops and bars, but I am not yet ready to be a hairy-faced child-scarer.
I will vanquish it with my weapon of choice, a steel rapier. Which is to say tweezers. Several other hairs may come to avenge it, but I will be ready for them. I've got my pride, after all. It's right here where I… oh.
3 comments:
I like to think of them less as whiskers, more as stray eyelashes.
There is a younger acquaintance of mine, and yours, who has been secretly plucking hairs from the top of his nose for near on 10 years. His girlfriend spilled the beans last week.
Hmm, interesting. Perhaps he will let the plucking slide a bit now that he has a new responsibility in his life. Am I right?
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