February

February already. I hope the rest of the  winter passes as quickly as January did as I’m very tired of the cold and the long dark nights. 

I’m having a day at home today. I did the same yesterday. One could quite justifiably regard it a postponed weekend, since last weekend was busy and Monday was frantic.  I lounged around all day yesterday, finishing a novel I’d been reading for several weeks: Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved; and picking up another I was part way through – A.N. Wilson, The Lampitt Papers, which I started so long ago that I can’t remember when that was, and which I plan to finish today.  I’ve been re-reading Galt’s The Spaewife for work, for the last couple of weeks. The book just gets richer and richer, which is both wonderful and alarming; the latter because I’d like to  be able to ‘get a line on it’ at some stage very soon, but it seems that, each time I pick it up, I notice something else worth mentioning about it, so instead of developing a line, I’m creating something resembling a stook of hay.

On Monday, I had my hair cut by someone new. It’s not a flattering cut as it’s both too short and rather severe, making me look like a bespectacled Joan of Arc. It was, I think, the only way the new girl could achieve what I’d asked for, namely the removal of as much evidence as possible of the previous hairdresser.   The previous hairdresser, who’d taken me over after the one I’d seen for some time left, and to whom I’d given two chances, had introduced into my hair what he referred to as ‘movement’.  This appeared to necessitate my vision being obscured by a thick shock of fringe  whenever I tilted my head forward (to read, to put the lead on the dog, to tie my shoelaces, to check toast under the grill), and the kind of layering I associate most closely with growing a style out.  I reached my wits’ end when putting together a flat pack set of shelves: hammering in tacks which vanish behind one’s fringe with every tap is so far from satisfactory that I’d phoned the salon to make an appointment before I’d completed constructing first shelf.  Since I am now a movement-free zone, I’ll probably be very pleased with the cut in about 6 weeks.  For now, I’m concentrating on the pleasure of being able to read without first needing to recreate the Forth Road Bridge in hairgrips; avoiding mirrors; and ignoring the temptation to wear a woolly hat 24/7.