high maintenance

I had to go and have my hair cut this morning.  Stretching it to six weeks between trims is as much as I can get away with, and even then it looks shaggy for the last week or two before the appointment.  I quite like my hair.  The female norm, according to all the hand wringing articles in the media, seems to be for self hatred encompassing every part of the body, and as for anyone over fifty liking any part of themselves, they must be delusional, or completely out of touch with contemporary norms.  Never mind.  My hair is thick with a natural curl, and actually I quite like the shape of the back of my head as well.  I have been going grey for years, and have now reached a sort of silvery stage, and do you know, I like that too.  However, to show all these charms off to best advantage, or any advantage at all, does require a regular trim

It should be oftener than six weeks, but that's the compromise I've reached between the time and money I'm prepared to invest in my hair, and the aesthetic ideal.  I do sometimes feel a twinge of envy about other people's hair, not that I want mine to be long or straight per se, but that I can't get away with leaving wider intervals between visits to the salon.  In my youth I sometimes wore it at shoulder length, but the ends were always splitting, and nowadays I couldn't kid myself that it looked even vaguely Pre Raphaelite, I should simply look like Gandalf.  Heigh ho.

I made my appointment for half past ten, to give time for the worst of the traffic to disperse, and while I was in Colchester I bought some charity Christmas cards, and tickets for various gigs at the Arts Centre next year, and a play at the Mercury.  Ticket prices at the Mercury have gone up a lot, but I suppose their funding has been cut, and I can't really expect the council tax payers of Colchester to pay too much for my theatre going M for Murder habit.  Annoyingly, Punt and Dennis were already sold out.  Apparently tickets were on sale before the latest brochure came out, but I failed to notice.  Since I'm on their e-mail list that suggests I haven't been reading their mailings very carefully, which either says something about me or something about their marketing technique.

That only left a couple of hours in the afternoon to weed in the front garden, before it got dark. Grape hyacinths start into leaf at the beginning of winter, and I lavished some of my limited (and slightly weed infested) supply of leaf mould on the long bed, as I thought that would brush nicely around their emerging leaves without smothering them.  And leaf mould is a supremely living mulch, and the sand of the long bed needs all the help it can get.  Darkness comes so early now.  By ten past four I had to pack my things away because I really couldn't see what I was pulling up or treading on, and by twenty past it was properly dark.

I lost half a day yesterday as well to my Pilates lesson.  Along with a decent haircut, one-to-one Pilates tuition is my only significant health and beauty expense (apart from new glasses, but they don't happen too often).  Pilates is many things to many people, and you can go to group classes where the aim is as much to meet people as to work on your core muscles and posture.  I don't think I'd learn anything at the back of a class, on that basis I might as well just buy a video.  As someone with bad posture and abysmal proprioception since childhood, I need a beady and knowledgeable eye on me to see what I'm doing and tell me about it.  I started seeing the teacher after a spell of self-referral to a physiotherapist.  I'd begun to develop an odd collection of symptoms, which eased when I lay on the sofa and did nothing, and got worse when I did anything and especially gardening, so I decided it was worth trying to get my lower back sorted out and see if that helped.

It did, but I thought I needed a long-term maintenance programme, and turned to Pilates.  The exercise regime is honestly rather dull, but it works, or at least it works for me.  I am significantly stronger and more supple than I was five years ago, and while I still get back ache, and occasional weird referred pains when I've been doing a lot of intensive bending and lifting, I'm not sure I get any more back ache than most people my age seem to get.  For anyone reading this blog who is suffering from back problems without doing anything to combat them, I would say, give it a try. Individual tuition is not cheap, but you can probably find something else you could do without, to offset the cost.  In my case, dyeing my hair.

Yesterday's afternoon gardening session didn't even last until four, because by twenty to I was too cold to carry on, and my breath was fogging my glasses up.  Truly, the days are too short at this time of the year.