Tag Archives: hair

Night Falls

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I just wrote a political manifesto, but as Julia pointed out, my plan for making sweeping changes to the way the country is run is impractical as we don’t have capital punishment or guns. And merely shooting the makers of reality TV programmes won’t immediately make the participants and viewers go out and take up education again.

She’s probably right, after all, in the USA they have lots of guns and capital punishment and their current political system has chosen to attack education rather than roll it out for everyone.

I’ll leave politics to other people.

Damsel Fly – Wilford

Instead, I will devote my thoughts to haircuts. My hair looks neatest when it is in a waste basket, and my head looks best when emulating a billiard ball. It is a tidy style to maintain with my excellent head shaver. Unfortunately, I don’t always keep it shaved. My recent experiences with the sun stopped me shaving for a bit, as my head was sore for a while. It was also dry, which is exacerbated by electric shaving.

Yes, I can moisturise, but I hate the idea of having small bits of passing debris  taking up residence on my head.

So, I now have hair. It has gone through the phase where it sticks out and makes me look astonished, and has become long enough to lay down and look like very short hair. Well, it does in patches. That’s the problem with being bald. It’s not the lack of flowing manly locks that worries me, or the visible manifestation of old age, it’s the untidy nature of partial coverage of the scalp. It’s untidy. Shaving tends to even things out and looks smarter.

Insects on Thistles

It is just unfortunate that a shaved head and the attendant folds of flesh at the top of my neck tend to make me look like prison officer from one of the less liberal countries of the world. Allied to a small, indistinct photograph (like the one of my driving license) I begin to look less like I’m involved in law enforcement and more like I’m involved in organised crime. I just don’t have the boyish good looks of a romantic hero.

And so, ruminating on what my life might have been if I had charm, good cheekbones and a cheery demeanour, I will go back to plotting world domination by means of light verse.

It’s likely to be an uphill struggle.

Marmalade Hoverfly

Marmalade Hoverfly

 

 

Shillings, Sorting and Sunset

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Julia had a restful day today and, as a result, is feeling better.  She seems surprised by this, despite events proving quite clearly that her bad back is linked to doing too much.

She’s just been reading a report on research done on Mensa members. It seems that the hairier you are, the smarter you are. She then offered the opinion that I should delay the remodelling of my beard, which I have been contemplating for some time. I’m not sure the correlation works quite as clearly as that, but it’s something to think about.

I wouldn’t want to decrease my IQ by cutting my hair, after all, by using ebay I’m already damaging my intelligence quite enough.

You don’t need a great deal of intelligence to sort shillings, lift boxes and organise accessories, which have been my main activities of day.

Sunset in Nottingham
Sunset over Wollaton Road, Nottingham

It was still light when we left the shop at 4.20, which is a good sign, and I took several shots of the sky at that point, before doing a few more in the supermarket car park whilst buying things for tea. I tried for some shots of the tiny sliver of moon but it wasn’t light enough and the long exposure meant that they all ended up shaky.

Night sky over Nottingham
Dusk at Nottingham

 

 

 

Mass Observation -2017 style

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Typical Blogger?
Typical Blogger’s Wife
And again…

I’ve been sitting and thinking again; thoughts went from blogging to diaries to Housewife, 49 and finally to Mass Observation.

It occurred to me that one day our blogs might be used as historical documents, like the Mass Observation archive or the Domesday Book.  At that point I started wondering just how accurate all these other historical documents are. The Domesday Book, being a tax document, is probably very accurate, though limited. The Mass Observation diaries are probably accurate as far as they go, but represent the views of people who aren’t necessarily representative of the population as a whole – described (by Wikipedia)  as “middle-class, educated, literate, and left of centre”.

I’ve never read Housewife, 49 but I have seen the TV adaptation and I’m not convinced by the “left of centre” but I can see that a group of diarists or bloggers could fit that description.

According to a blog I’ve just looked at, bloggers are, in general, ambitious, self-reflective and forever learning. I agree that most bloggers seem to be self-reflective and forever learning, though I’m not sure about ambitious. There are other qualities mentioned, but I’ll let you follow the link if you want to discover more about yourself.

Meanwhile, let’s consider my blog as history.

If anyone tries to reconstruct a picture of the 21st century using my blog as a source, they are going to think that the average UK citizen was more concerned about cheese, brown sauce and words to describe book hoarding than they were about Brexit, global warming and Trumpageddon. (In the UK trump is a slightly archaic word for breaking wind in the UK, and cows emitting methane as a result of the digestive process are said to be responsible for destroying the ozone layer, so those last two items could be the same thing.)

It also explains why, despite the example of Sir Toby Belch, nobody in the UK actually thought he was going to win. Joke names, like bald candidates, tend not to win. That’s why Derrick J Knight is always going to be top dog in the blogosphere, and I, with my shiny head, will always be second.

I wonder if that was why Samual Pepys, a somewhat retro blogger, wore a wig.

However, I digress. I really meant to discuss how representative bloggers are in the scheme of history. It seems to me that we are more interested in health, food and books than the average person. On the other hand, that might be the effect of blogging about those subjects, and following people with similar views.

If I blogged about body modification, manga and mud wrestling I would probably have a completely different view of my fellow bloggers. (Ask your grandchildren if you need any explanations).

So, how representative do you feel?