Guilty pleasures and half measures
Misinforming moral baggage. Swapping drink for a stronger anaesthetic. A humungous but. The ideal New Year activity. And my no longer a secret guilty pleasure.
It’s a while since I woke up on January 1st with a cracking headache. Nothing interesting or especially alcoholic has happened to me on New Year’s Eve for a while, or at least a year, and I will never hunt something out specially for a night that comes at the end of a period of overindulgence and will itself involve overindulgence. A big NYE ensures you start the new year serially depleted and not just physically tired but short of those crucial cheering hormones like serotonin and dopamine that help you get out of bed on a rainy, cold morning in January.
New Year’s Eve as practised by us lot here in Pissed Up Britain is irrational, it’s counterintuitive. How can you be New Year New Me if you’re just a OH MY GOD I’M SO HUNGOVER version of old you and in your depletion probably clinging on to anxious worries from the last year hence dragging all your emotional baggage across the hearth of hope and renewal. Yeah, fuck New Year’s Eve
Having said all that, I did have a hangover yesterday. I was invited to a dinner at a prime piece of barn conversion porn in Somerset. Smoking outside one of its many doors with the friend I received the invite via we said just two words each, “lovely house” - “yes tiz” - which contained concisely the disappointment we shared about our own property-owning achievements as much, even more, than the admiration of this one we wheezing our tabs beside. There was no envy in there because the hostess was too kind and unspoiled by airs of superiority or house proudliness.
This kind lady with the dream home put me up in a room with an apex comfortable bed, which felt even comfier given the mattress trials of the cupboard months and the thin mattresses I lay my cupboard wrecked body ‘pon at Christmas. She said upfront that this was a doggy house and she didn’t care where they went or what they did, which immediately made me relax 80% more, but not entirely because I know how bad my dogs can be when they are bad. “Do any of your neighbours have cats or chickens? Are there livestock in any of the fields around you?” I wondered. “Yes, but they stay away or are locked up, and no,” she said. I relaxed 90%. There is always room for a disaster with the podencos, hence the remaining ten percent of ever present caution.
I didn’t know anyone, but when you’re made to feel welcome that doesn’t need to be a problem. At dinner I was seated next to hairdresser emanating vibes of a comfortable and financially secure existence. “Hair is everything” is probably the most sage line uttered in Fleabag for it does govern thoughts in the way that other dead bits of protein sprouting from our body don’t.
Hair being everything, the chat was good. I can talk about hair. We discussed the exotic gangsterism of Tommy Yeardye, father of Tamara “Jimmy Choo” Mellon, who brought Vidal Sassoon to the world.
We slagged off hair colourists, he said there were very few good ones out there, and those that were good were top expensive. There are a few things wrong in the world that are more serious than the fact that dyed hair often looks so crap. Even the really luxe dye jobs that make a head of hair look as lush as a 25 year old’s sit oddly on an older face. Worse, is the older face framed by a crackling, dry halo of knackered hair courtesy of decades long abuse peroxide and hair irons abuse. Getting a thoughtful and sophisticated dye job is difficult, and expensive. No one seems to want one either. I look at certain ladies of immense wealth wonder why they want to have big fake tits, big thick black hair (half of it flogged by a 14 year old in the former Soviet Union probably) cascading down their back like a mermaid, and big lips like a couple of frankfurters. Money can’t buy you style. (But it can buy you a nice barn conversion.)
A wise and successful cutter once said to me of the dying that some women will do right up to the end when they do the other sort of dying, “It’s like being in an abusive relationship”. You are constantly trying, soothing, begging and tip-toeing around your hair, hoping it will look good for you.
Yes we had plenty to talk about. We really went for it on blow dries and how awful and chavvy even really luxy ones can look. The aforementioned beachy waves, the helmet, the mushroom cloud. Hair is everything but so too is being high but not dry on New Years Eve.
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