The Saturday column: 80's hair
Pointless stories about my life
“Brush your hair forward,” my wife says as we’re walking down the street.
Unsure of quite what to do I sort of rub my head with my hand in a non committal way which causes her to sigh in frustration.
“You look like someone from the 80s,” she says.
“I think, technically, I am someone from the 80s,” I say, before adding: “or, I suppose I should say, the 70s.”
“You look like you should be wearing stonewashed denim,” she says.
The first time I can remember really wanting some clothes was in the 80s when I took a peculiar hankering for a stone washed denim ‘suit’ (jeans and matching denim jacket), which for some reason were perfectly paired, in my mind, with a bright yellow jumper.
Amazingly my parents went along with the whim, and somehow - presumably by means of a birthday or Christmas present - I ended up in double stone washed denim, and a yellow sweater which had a kind of cable pattern down the front. I LOVED that outfit, I should point out that I was barely in double figures age wise at that point in my life. I found a piece of pumice stone in one of the jacket pockets - it seemed very exotic to me at the time.
All things shall pass.
I have no real sense of what sort of hair cut I had back when I was less than twelve, probably one with a fringe. In the 1990s I got more adventurous with hair - it was variously green, red and purple, at one point it was shaved into a short mohawk. Most famously, thanks to my friend Kim and the big sink in the agriculture classroom, it once went a sickly bleached yellow. My parents were not impressed by Kim’s peroxide based efforts, but I liked it.
Now it is largely brown, albeit increasingly grey. And apparently ‘swept back’.
“Brush it forward,” my wife insists, “why do you keep sweeping it back like that?”
“Do I keep sweeping it back?” I enquire.
“You do it without thinking about it,” she says.
How do you stop doing something that you do without thinking, or even realising you’re doing it? I wondered, as we continued out walk.
Some years ago I read a book about forming habits, how its done and how new habits can be formed intentionally. I now realise that I don’t remember anything it said except a vague sense that it basically said you can change habits if you want to.
Once back at home I get the book about habits and open it at a random page. The first sentence says: “The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.”
“Yup, that’s what I thought,” I say, and close the book again.
The general gist begins to crystallise more clearly in my mind - to form a new habit, or change an old one, the author claims, you have to train yourself to have a different habit, and you do this by getting a small reward each time you do it. ‘It’s not rocket surgery’ as a friend of mine would say.
My wife walks into the room, I reach my hand up to my head and brush my hair forward. “That’ll be a pound please,” I say.
‘Saturday columns’ are short, (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life. There’s not supposed to be any point to them. But they might make you smile. Bear with me if I don’t manage every Saturday, I’m working on it.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.
Not just double denim, but stonewashed double denim 🫣😆