. . . on a significant birthday
MY OUTDOORSY IRISH holiday offered the opportunity to recall what it’s like to be attacked by midges but also, on the upside, a chance to reflect upon an event I can’t help feeling I should be in the middle of organising.
Somewhere between now and Christmas I will wake up one morning and it will be the morning of what is viewed by many as a “significant” birthday. I don’t imagine that it is much more significant than any other birthday or any of those other days when I register with bemused wonder that I am a little bit older.
Those mornings when I notice that small bits of skin or hair have sprouted, like bonus extras on a DVD, on unexpected body parts, or that my hands, when I look down, suddenly look more wrinkled around the knuckles. They are somebody else’s hands, I think, until I realise that they are attached to my wrists. Mine.
There are other signs that I am nearing a “significant” age and should be out choosing venues and invites and expensive shoes I can’t walk in.
The one-morning hangover is now the three-day hangover, even when the night out ended around midnight and involved only one brandy Alexander when the wine has all been drunk, instead of six.
The grey hairs that I used to be able to count have now colonised my head and require masquerading too frequently for me to be able to afford doing it in a hairdresser’s.
So I spend a few euro in the chemist on boxes with blissed-out-looking women on them and hope for the best. One night, looking into a mirror with a plastic bag on my head and a barnet full of dye, I see my mother in the reflection. This is perfectly fine. There are far worse people who could be looking back at me.
It turns out this home dyeing lark is not sustainable. I come back to Portadown from a camper-van holiday in Northern Ireland and, looking in the mirror for the first time in a week, I realise that the cheap home-dye jobs have done me no favours. “My hair is terrible,” I think.
Then in case this message didn’t hit home, Queenie, my mother-in-law-in-waiting, says “Ach, Róisín, your hair is terrible,” and she calls her own hairdresser and asks for an “urgent” appointment as though she is sending me to the hair equivalent of AE; I’ve an almost-significantly aged woman here. She needs highlights. Stat.
Queenie would die if she knew I once spent €250 on getting my hair done. I nearly expired myself, truth be told, because I had just had the babies and I knew how many nappies that would have bought. She sends me to Donna, who has a tiny hairdresser’s with a metal grille on the window, beside a chipper in Portadown.
I look around Donna’s tiny shop and see why this place is able to offer what Queenie says is the best value for money in Co Armagh. There are no scented candles, no chairs that massage you seven different ways, no freshly brewed Americanos, no sparkling water, no long consultations about how I want my hair done, no chat about caramels and golds and other shades of hair nirvana that are all, essentially, the same. I think the conversation in Donna’s lasted 10 seconds.
Me: “I’ve kind of wrecked it by dyeing it myself, it’s too dark, I’d like some lighter bits going through it.” Hairdresser: “No, bother. I’ll just mix up the wee colour, so I will.”
Some people might expect that the hair-do I got looked quite different to the €250 job. Newsflash: It looked better, actually.
So, my hair will be sorted for my “significant” birthday. I’ve also finally, after threatening to do it for the past 10 years, organised my jewellery, which has a tendency to turn up all over the house, in unlikely places. I spend an evening hammering in small gold-coloured nails in my bedroom wall. Knowing that my cheap and cheerful jewellery is all on view feels very grown up. My significant life partner reckons it’s like living in Claire’s Accessories but that’s a small price to pay, surely, for no longer finding earrings in your porridge.
I am supposed to be figuring out what to do for this significant birthday, but I think I’d rather sit at home with Good Hair by Donna and study the lines on my hands than throw a party. I’ve grown quite attached to these hands. And you know what they say. Old hands, warm heart.