Hair of an old man

I woke up this morning with old man's hair. It was mostly on my head and none of it was running the right way, it was old, badly behaved and cantankerous, it had lost it's elasticity and it's memory. It was like fake hair. Like straw or thread or some lifeless grey thing that had knitted it's way across the top of my head and was now travelling on it's, of it's own accord in some direction I couldn't quite fathom. Bitter and peppered with too much sunlight, car exhaust fumes, sugar and not enough hormones. Then the awful question, “does it have a funny smell, like old people do?” That's all you need first thing in a day destined to full of maps, computers, electric mirrors, biscuit fibres and packet soups, tales of time travel and desperation and remote examples of unproven food poisoning – none of it to do with me. On days like this, when you are thinking the thoughts of a young man or of a man at least a half of your age you don't want to be bogged down with the frizzled frustration of your old hair. At least the experience has given me a strategy, a way forward, a plan, a bit of revenge. I'll be there at the barbers on Friday afternoon, looking across the sunlit Firth of Forth and watching that old man's hair fall onto my shoulders and onto the floor as it's snipped away and swept up in a dustpan, punished like the regular and persistent offender it truly is and then stuffed into an imaginary cushion that's gifted to some care home or bit of imagined sheltered housing, there to hold a sleepy head, a tumbler of false teeth, a saucer of digestive biscuits and a rolled up copy of the Daily Express. I will go down of course but I will be fighting and I'll ignore, inhibit and ethnically cleanse the aspirations and false claims of this rebel hair. “£8? Keep the change!”