. . . on pink hair
IKNOW I ALREADY had a holiday, but shortly after I came back I needed another one. You know the kind. Where you get at least one lie-in and time to read Vanity Fair from cover to cover and watch terrible movies called The Women starring Meg Ryan that you’d never be bothered watching at home. So myself and my old school friend decamped to Killarney and the beautiful Muckross Park Hotel where I thought the most exciting thing that would happen was a foot massage and a trip on a jaunting car.
But on the train, flicking through a magazine, my friend and I saw a picture of a young girl with pink hair. “I’ve wanted pink hair for years,” my friend, who was having an insignificant birthday that weekend, suddenly announced, her eyes glinting with a teenage promise to herself not kept.
I know this woman well so I immediately deduced that it was extremely probable, not to say highly likely, I would be returning home on the train with a woman who had pink hair. For someone else expressing the desire to have pink hair would be a whim, a fanciful half-threat. Not this lady.
Before you could say Gwen Stefani I had asked the internet to find the finest hair salon in Killarney and the always obliging internet replied Seán Taaffe’s. Then I rang them asking do you do pink hair (yes) and how long would it take (four hours give or take) and how much would it cost (about the price of the birthday money burning a hole in my friend’s pocket). I booked her in for a consultation as soon as we got off the train. Her husband calls me The Great Enabler. I can’t think why.
My friend said she knew the hairdresser was going to tell her that it would ruin her hair but she was going to go pink anyway. “It’s going to ruin your hair,” said the hairdresser, who was rocking an unnatural shade herself. “But it will look amazing. You can carry it off.” She got a skin test, booked in for the following morning and got the mobile number of the hairdresser “in case you change your mind”. Later, in the hotel, while I had my feet rubbed in the Cloisters spa which smells of lemongrass and heaven and she was being pummelled in the back region, she thought about the prospect of pink hair. This was something she had always wanted. The time would come when she would not be able to “carry it off”.
She didn’t want to be in a nursing home looking out a window and wishing she had dyed her hair pink. It’s not as though she would be pink-headed forever.
She just wanted to get the pink thing out of her system. And she was still on maternity leave, so it was the perfect time. There’s not many jobs apart from pop star you can do with pink hair, which, when you think about it, is a shame.
By lunchtime the next day her hair was pink. Like candyfloss. Like a pink fluorescent light. Pink and curly instead of dark brown and curly. And I can now confirm that when you have pink hair everyone stares. They stare and they say “you’re hair is pink!” or “look at your woman!” Small children let go of their mother’s hands and forget about their ice-creams and just gawp in admiration at the pinkness of it all.
The hotel had kindly provided us with a picnic, so we took a jaunting car to Ross Castle. The driver pointed out the Lake of Learning, so-called because of the studious monks who lived on one of the small islands. At the castle, a man with tattoos was drying off after a dip in the Lake of Learning. I wondered if he was smarter now. His girlfriend had long hair dyed the colour of an English post box so she exchanged expressions of solidarity with my pink-haired friend.
Then she took her pink hair off for a solitary stroll and I ate the picnic and did a bit of what I love doing most on holiday which is people watching. A group of slender French students were returning from a walk. Their teachers were sitting waiting for them on a picnic table and as they filed past each student was handed two biscuits. There was no rush to the snack hut, no hot dogs, no sandwiches, no fizzy drinks. After a while, a cry went up in French from a teacher which must have meant ‘who would like one more biscuit?’ because some boys ran to the table and waved their custard creams and chocolate bourbons victoriously in the air. I ate my picnic and resisted ordering a hot dog in their honour.
When she came back my friend told me she had walked through an old graveyard and it reminded her how temporary everything is and how, while some people might make a big deal of it, having fluorescent hair for a fleeting moment was nothing really in the larger scheme of things. And later, over dinner, she got a call to say her last lovely grandparent had died, and when she returned crying to the table she said she sort of knew that Granny would have understood about the pink hair.
I suppose I am recounting all this because as we get older we all feel certain things are beyond us, and sometimes they are, but sometimes we’ve just been conditioned to think that way. We worry about what people will say and we hold ourselves back and really what I just wanted to point out is that if people want pink hair, they should have pink hair, or whatever their own equivalent of pink hair might be.
In other news . . . Speaking of hair, my eternal search for high-quality, low-price salons has turned up a real gem. Koreana, around the corner from the cinema on Parnell Street in Dublin 1, offers great service and value, including blow dries for as little as a tenner. The Chinese pop music isn’t bad either. Tel: 01-873 5290