138. In the hair and now

My Hairy Situation has happily stopped us from having to talk about the weather for roughly a year and a half.

That glamorous I-wouldn't-dare-to-go-that-short look, but doesn't it suit you!

Those curls that have, quite literally, come out of nowhere.

The hair loss has made me cry (once or twice) and laugh (countless times), and has provided all of us with plenty of entertainment.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.

Wish You Were Hair.

But this is the end of that era. My friends, I have paid a visit to Andrew the hairdresser. (Remember him?)

About, oh, once a month or so, I would look in the mirror and decide that something had to be done at last. Too wild! Too strange!

But I never dialled Andrew's number, because I was too intrigued. What would happen to the curls? Would it suit me to wear it a bit longer? I decided to leave it uncut for exactly one year after it started growing.

This was quite a safe thing to do. I have discovered that no-one, but NO-ONE, will dare to criticise the hairdo of a recovering cancer patient. However outrageous it might look, I could safely predict that people would fall over themselves to compliment me on it. With relief in their eyes, because frankly, they couldn't really compliment me on the bald look. They tried, and many of you sounded reasonably convincing, but really: looking at the photo gallery below, you will have to admit that you wouldn't pick the first one out of Andrew's catalogue of options.

But now the year is over. I finished my treatment at the end of January 2015 and stopped shaving the miserly stubble there and then. A year on, it had grown exactly 12 centimetres.

This is what 12 centimetres looks like.

The wild hair, untamed

Welcome back to the 1980s. It's not an era you'd like to recommend to your stylist.

Andrew was booked in.

Cries of protests erupted from friends and even from daughters.
NOOOO!!! It looks lovely, so thick and luscious and amazing etc etc.
Don't cut it, was the consensus instruction.

I sort of agreed and almost cancelled Andrew, but not having seen him for so long, I thought I'd go anyway and ask his opinion. He cheered me into the salon, took one look and said, "It doesn't need cutting."

He sat me down and ran his fingers through the curls, marvelling. We stared in the mirror.

The wild hair, tamed

"Why change it?" he asked. "You like it. It suits you. It's not offending me in any way. Not the back, not the longer bits on the top. I can tidy it up, but you'll walk out of here looking pretty much the same."

So whilst catching up on a year and a half of news, he made me look less like Wild Woman of Cancerland, more like someone with a choice. For good measure, and on the spur of the moment, I went straight from the hair chair to an eyebrow chair. I have never, ever had my eyebrows plucked (I confess that until fairly recently, I didn't even know that eyebrow chairs existed).

I discovered the effect of organised eyebrows when I had none and occasionally painted them on - and on those fake-brow-days, I would miraculously get multiple comments on how well and glamorous I looked.

(Don't be fooled by people looking well and glamorous. It's war paint, mostly.)

Nobody has noticed either the hair cut or the tidy brows.

The only person in our household who usually does notice such things is in bed with a fever. But who cares?

Having gone through a wide range of diverse looks, I now know with great clarity and certainty that your looks truly don't matter beyond fleeting first impressions (which your friends don't need, as they are impressed already). But strangely, simultaneously, looks DO matter.

Because you might not notice my tamed locks, but I notice. That's what matters.

So here I am, in the Hair And Now.

I leave you with a gallery of the past year.

These selfies were taken at monthly intervals. And that is the final word on my hair. I'm afraid we'll now have to go back to discussing the weather. Did you hear about the havoc caused by storm Gertrude?