When I get older, losing my hair

(I suppose I should post something about Obama but, really, what is there to say? The sheriff is near...)

The other day, I had an Ayurvedic fusion massage. It was work, not play: I was reviewing the spa facilities at a big posh hotel. This isn't my usual sort of gig, I should stress. I tend to cover restaurants, shops and the like; activities where you keep your mind on the job, and most of your clothes on. As I submitted to the expert fingers of my therapist, I wondered how one is supposed to review such an experience; how can you keep your critical faculties intact when the whole point of the experience is to drift off into a sort of blissful half-sleep? Like the Sixties, if you remember it, you weren't there.

At one point, she proferred a tub of some fragrant unguent, laced with ginger, aloe and apricot, explaining that it would strengthen my hair roots. As she rubbed it into my scalp, I wondered whether such claims would stand up to the rigours of the Advertising Standards Authority. I do remember that purveyors of hair products are forbidden from saying that such-and-such can give you healthy hair, because all visible hair is essentially dead; the best you can hope for is "healthy-looking hair". But what does that mean? If something can't in reality be healthy, how can it look healthy? Could you have a healthy-looking rock, or a healthy-looking chair?

The fact that my mind was meandering along such a pointless, meaningless trajectory is, I suppose a tribute to the care-kneading properties of the spa. Maybe I should just type 1000 words of stream-of-consciousness bollocks and say there, that's how good this place is.

On the way home on the train, still slightly spaced out, I found my battered copy of Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief tangled up with various press releases at the bottom of my bag, and realised that three weeks ago, I'd got to within 20 pages of the end and then forgotten about it. Which may say something about Coupland's ability to write compelling prose, or my ability to finish what I'd started, or both. Or, of course, neither.

But I won't review the book, except to say that it feels like an uneasy synthesis of Coupland's self-consciously post-modernly smartarse works (Generation X, Microserfs, JPod - the ones where it sometimes feels as if the plot is just an excuse for a barrage of one-liners) and the more heartfelt ones about dysfunctional families and suburban loneliness (All Families Are Psychotic, Eleanor Rigby).

I'll just offer this short extract:

By twenty-five you know you're never going to be a rock star, by thirty you know you're never going to be a dentist, and by forty there are maybe three things left that you can still possibly be -- and even then, that's only if you run as fast as you possibly can to try to catch the train.

Which links, however tangentially, with two events of the weekend; my bubblewrap-related midlife crisis and seeing Nick and Barney for the first time in Dawkins knows how long. Because, with all due respect to the many fine, upstanding, dedicated, talented firefighters and brain surgeons and teachers and fishmongers and actuaries and Sudoku compilers and lumberjacks and bank clerks and hod carriers and psychiatric social workers and morticians and spivs and dilettantes and flâneurs and hotel spa reviewers out there, I've come to the conclusion that there are only two jobs worth doing: editing the Guinness Book of Records; and being a Dalek. And between us, we cracked them both. Before we were forty.

Verse about face

Poets as a species aren't particularly known for their modesty, but they can occasionally be creatively self-deprecating, albeit in a distinctly "aren't I bloody great?" sort of manner. WH Auden famously described his own face as being "like a wedding cake left out in the rain", a line that Jimmy Webb subsequently adapted for inclusion (= stole) in the neo-psychedelic MOR epic 'Macarthur Park'. (Incidentally, David Hockney rather topped Auden by surveying the old poet's battered, furrowed countenance and wondering aloud "If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?")

And now the famously unlovely (in more ways than several) Philip Larkin has come up with a posthumous cracker, having described a less than flattering photograph of himself as "CS Lewis on a drugs charge", which sounds as if it could be the original of that tiresome construction, "X is like Y on acid", but probably wasn't. It does however throw down a challenge. I've long identified myself as Andy Partridge with gout, but I'm sure my lovely readers can skewer themselves with far more élan than that. Are you Hyacinth Bucket eating Space Dust? Richard Dawkins not sure where he left his keys? Or Mao Zedong desperate for a pee? Over to you.

PS: More Larkin about, from themanwhofellasleep.

PPS: Anyone know where Wyndham's disappeared to?

Chuck out the syrup

The obituaries of Charlton Heston concur: here was an example of life following art. As Moses and Ben Hur, El Cid and George Taylor, he played men who stood for dignity and freedom, and whether or not you agree that civil rights and gun rights are morally equivalent, he stuck his neck out for both. Then, when the scourge of Alzheimer’s confronted him, he faced it as he had faced the Egyptians and the gorillas, with great bravery.

But in one small area, his heroism slipped. Unflinching in his defence of African-Americans and gun-owners, Heston was never quite brave enough to acknowledge his own baldness. He set his granite jaw and battered nose against injustice, but from his own genetic inheritance, he cowered beneath a succession of increasingly preposterous toupees, of the sort that even Frankie Howerd might have spurned as unbecoming. As Chuck wielded his trusty flintlock, his wig looked like something he’d just shot.

As someone whose time in the barber’s chair becomes more cursory with each successive visit, I know that few men welcome baldness. But why do so many still persist in fighting it, and make themselves look even more ridiculous than they would in their natural state? As with boob jobs and facelifts, wigs rarely go unnoticed, especially by the many websites dedicated to seeking them out. And if we know someone wears a wig, we assume that person is insecure, or vain, or in denial about the aging process – surely a worse sin than baldness (or, for that matter, sagging breasts or jowls).

Wigs are about more than baldness – they are about honesty and dignity, or the lack of them. Everyone knows that Bruce Forsyth wears a (bad) hairpiece, but few raise the subject in his company. The man is 80 years old now – is it really so shameful to be bald? Maybe not, but if he were to ditch his syrup now, he would be admitting that he’s been fibbing for the last three decades or so. Increasing numbers – Sean Connery, Patrick Stewart and Bruce Willis, for example – are proud of their slaphead status. But others, and I’m sure you know the names, still cower beneath the weave. Come on, guys, when even Heston’s namesake Bobby abandoned his combover, surely the game was up.

There are obvious parallels with homosexuality. I’m sure there are some people in the public eye who have never bothered to come out because everyone knows anyway, and any big announcement would be an embarrassing anticlimax. But wig-wearers don’t need to say anything. They just need to ditch their hairy friends once and for all, and allow their scalps to shine out and proud. Do it, slapheads. Go to the only place where Charlton Heston feared to tread.

Ho ho whatever...

In which I send a Christmas card, or as close as anyone's going to get from me this year.

Also: from the Observer, Mary Riddell on general crapness within the BBC, and an uncharacteristically interesting sprawl of comments to follow; and in the Telegraph, of all places, Rupert Everett further stakes his claim to be a stately homo of England with his comments on cosmetic surgery:

"I'm thinking of having a pubic lift, and maybe a face lift, too, with some rather visible, neatly tailored scars, like the seams on a suit."