I was looking for inspiration this Thursday and guess what happened? I ended up here hair here, on Light Motifs II, via Fandango who told a tale of his Hair. I’m going to tell a short tale of mine.

I stopped washing my hair when I was 18, allegedly the natural oils took care of things and after 8 weeks the hair would be clean as a whistle. It was the time from weeks 4 to 8 which was really the issue; it started top smell, really badly and I had to abort the project a couple of times before I succeeded, imagine wasting 6 weeks twice and having to start again, I spent the best part of half a year completing the project. By the time it was done, I was done too and had left school, worked as a cellar boy to gather some money together, found myself on a relentlessly funny 7 months of travel all over Asia, Australia, The South Pacific and finally back to my folks house, with my school mates.

My hair continued to grow, and I kept it back for the most part in a pony tail. At Uni, my girlfriend liked to dye her hair, i’d always fancied red, so we dyed mine, it was a dirty  red, like blood on a pub car park. I kept it in a pony tail, it kept growing and by now was stuck together, tangled like vines, an amorphous fuzzy mass of proper dreadlocks, with the occasionally visible hair braid from India, the cotton filthy and worn.

During this time I was enjoying myself far too much and was even skinnier than I was when in India, a mere slip of a lad, with far too much leisure time to kill, I was loving life at the expense of worrying my folks over my mental well being, “Fear and Loathing in Southport”.

It was at this point that I had to return home to my folks house which was mental and so  then onto a mates for some normality; burning of the candle had taken its toll and the thought that maybe my hedonistic strength was contained in my hair seemed perfectly feasible to me. So we cut it, my dreads thudded to the floor, we swept them up and put them in a bag.

I’d missed a half term of my degree by now, I didn’t really care, and so because we had no phone I returned back to the house I shared with my other 2 mates, we were known as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, after, well, the Freak Brothers. I think I had a Sonic the Hedgehog cap which I wore, no idea why, my hair was about an inch in length all over, the idea to create some fun size dreads like the Rebel MC. So the following day I walked down to to the small garden shop, bought some beeswax and multi coloured rubber bands and proceeded to twist the hair, melt the beeswax onto the twists and then wrap up with multicoloured rubber bands.

Guess what, this was a disaster, and didn’t work, I went clubbing that night in my Sonic the Hedgehog cap, lost the cap, my hair looked strange and pinched on my head. The next day we cut and shaved it with scissors and some Bic Razors. A dungaree wearing 8 stone slip of a lad, with a sallow complexion who looked like I had been in prison for years.

It was time to sort my self out; and here I am, 48 with a double chin, a slightly rotund beer belly and a pair of hair clippers in the bathroom, I still shave my head to about grade 1 or 2 depending on the weather, and in my moments of mid life crisis I think to myself, maybe I should grow that pony tail of red dreads again. I don’t know where the hair went, I may still have the bag of it somewhere. This is pretty much how the story goes, but the order of things may be slightly mixed up, aside form that its all true.