Things fall apart

Morning world. You look nice. Except your hair. Do something with your hair. Maybe put it under a hat. That would work.

Sorry. Your hair is fine. I'm just using transference to feel better about myself. My hair is... well, it's rubbish. I had it cut yesterday, and sat looking at myself in the mirror throughout. Who, I thought,  is this crap haired, fat faced troll in front of me? OK, there is still a certain striking nobility to my feautures that reminds one of a heroic prince or glamorous serial kiler. But heavens, all the various components of my face seem to be wandering apart from each other in a desperate bid to escape their collective shame.

And the hair! As always, once she had finished whirling scissors dangerously close to my eyes, the hairdresser enacted her favourite act of cruelty. She picked up her mirror and showed me the back of my head. Well, I say my head. She seemed to be mistakenly showing me the back of someone else's head -some middle aged, balding loser, for whom no haircut would ever again look cool or interesting. As she let me gaze upon the arid wilderness of my scalp, she smiled an evil smile.

And off I wandered, looking glumly into shop windows, freshly appalled at the discrepancy between my self image and the shambling zombie man I have become. But despair not, gentle reader. I did not wallow in this despair for long. For I have a way through these patches of darkness. I look at my feet.

It's not that my feet are brilliant or anything. I don't have amazingly sexy feet that make women swoon and men smash bricks into their faces in sheer envy. The brilliant thing about my feet is dead simple: they work. I can walk, and run, and bound excitedly up stairs pretending to be Ham Tyler in 'V', the 1980s science fiction show about evil lizards.

And as much as I can sit and moan about the sheer laziness of my hair, I'd rather that it was my hair that gave up than my feet - or my eyes, or fingers or anything alse for that matter. At my place of work there is a number of students who either can't walk at all or walk with extreme difficulty. And while they can sit and stroke their luxuriant heads of lovely wavy hair, and call my 'Mr Shiny Head' and laugh at my inability to convincingly use a comb, I'm not sure their superiority in the field of haircuts really makes their life better than mine.

Even more annoyingly, they don't really complain about it. You've seen what I'm like about my hair. Imagine if I was wheelchair bound. Or blind! Imagine what a pain I would be then. But no. These students, for the most part, show the kind of grace and acceptance of their lot that I can't even manage over a bald spot. So I try to think of that, when I'm whining about the hand I've been dealt by the god of haircuts, and most of the time it helps. If it doesn't, I just challenge one of them to a race. They are, without exception, rubbish at this, and I always win.