Monthly Archives: December 2009

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Space rides and foreign climes

For the first time in months, Betty and the boy person friend drove down to Hamilton. It was yesterday, the day before Betty’s birthday, which made it all the more exciting, and they were driving the great friend’s car (he calls it the Knight Rider, Betty recently discovered) — this, too, tended to be somewhat exciting. However, all interested parties survived the journey.

It was rather a busy day — Betty taught a couple of clients in the morning, then did the advanced mat class, and then went for a speedy coffee with a visiting instructor who had come to do the class. Massimo, usually exemplary, forgot the soy, and so it took about half an hour to actually receive the coffee; then Betty ran home, got ready in record time, and leaped into the car to collect the boy person. They arrived at the University of Betty’s youth only slightly late, and slipped in to watch the end-of-year piano concert, featuring two of Betty’s sisters on piano and cello. Continue reading →

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I Sit and Think

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall never see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
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Hairdressers and other mysteries

Betty had her hair cut today. This is not a frequent occurrence. There was a time when Betty’s hair reached fingertip-length, before she chopped it to shoulder-length a few years ago: it has fluctuated up and down her thorax ever since. Today’s haircut, however, was slightly bolder than before. Some of it is collarboney, and one piece can just fit into her mouth. It is a good haircut.

Many haircuts, of course, are not good: Betty remembers several, over the years. In the fingertip days, naturally, there was not a terrible amount of room for disaster — and, if it comes to that, Betty’s hairdressers tended to be good sorts of people. There was Carlos, who had only a very minimal number of fingers on his cutting hand, and a slightly larger number on his other one; he was a fine hairdresser. There was also Carlos’s apprentice, a young boy who appeared to have only been introduced in passing to some of the more challenging scenarios that would present themselves to him over his career: he looked at Betty for quite a while — she was in her mid-teens and at more or less the height of her length, as it were — and after some deliberation he sat down, cross-legged, on the floor, so that he could snip the ends.

In more recent years, however, there were some quite unusual hairdressers. The most staggering was a wee girl in one of the swanky salons in Casabella Lane — Betty chose her on account of the fact that nobody else could fit Betty in, and she was meeting the boy person friend that afternoon and could not afford to be choosy. The hairdresser became chatty, and asked Betty all about her trips to the big city, where Betty, at the time, was studying. The conversation went something like this:

Hairdresser: Do you go up for the weekend?

Betty: No, I generally drive up for the day. Sometimes, however, I stay for the night with friends, or I go to an hotel.

Hairdresser [recalling, through the haze of volumizer, a previous topic]: But do you not stay with your boy-friend?

Betty: No, no.

Hairdresser: Oh. He lives very far away, does he?

Betty: No, not really, but I don’t stay with him.

Hairdresser [knowingly]: Ah. Wife and children?

[Betty wonders for a moment whether this is a cute way of implying that Betty is some kind of upper-level Good Girl, waiting not only for matrimony but also for offspring before she moves in with the boy person. It subsequently dawns on her that this is not the case -- but, alas, too late.]

Hairdresser [comfortably]: No problem, we’ve heard it all, you wouldn’t believe. I’ll just get the straighteners.

Continue reading →

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Favourite things: Penguin Great Ideas

It is well-known that Betty has a fairly hefty thing for Augustine. She also has a committed fondness for Unity Books and Penguin. Imagine her excitement when she gets to go in and peruse the Penguin Great Ideas display.

And these are the tip of the iceberg — the series includes Robert Louis Stevenson’s Apology for Idlers, George Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder, Virginia Woolf’s Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid, Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, William Morris’s Useful Work versus Useless Toil, Plato’s Symposium, Marco Polo’s Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan, even Revelation and Job in one slim volume. Each book is small and pleasing, in lovely paper, beautifully designed, and cheap. Great ideas, indeed.

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Manicures and spatial awareness

Betty, who has the most rockin’ of clients, got a voucher from a client. It promised her a mini-manicure at Lucy and the Powder Room, the new swanky salon at the incredibly swish Department Store. Betty, therefore, tootled up to the Powder Room after her morning at the studio was done. It was a chillin’ time at the salon: the place was mostly populated by two beauty therapists, or, as they may have been, nail artistes:  they were pleasingly dressed in chic grey smocks, such as might be worn by, say, the supervising sisters at an alternate-reality 1960 unwed mothers’ home, and they had gold nurses’ watches pinned to their fronts.

Betty chose a polish in a kind of post-apocalyptic Williamsburg blue, or like a slightly iridescent dolphin; the artiste led her to a sweet little table for two and laid her hands, palm-reader-style (but, of course, palms down), on an expanse of white towel. “They’re very short,” said the artiste. She was referring to Betty’s nails, not her hands, which are in fact rather long; Betty will remind readers that a bored haematologist once caught sight of Betty’s hands and impulsively measured her wingspan, investigated her palate and proceeded to X-ray her in search of a Marfan’s index. This diagnosis did not eventuate. The artiste regretfully informed Betty that she would have to go for what she technically termed a “roundy shape”, the (apparently much cooler) “squary shape” being unavailable on such short nails. Betty readily acquiesced (she is a roundy, not a squary, anyway), and the artiste proceeded to file, buff, scrape, press, clip, again buff, clean and finally polish Betty’s nails.

One wonders why it was termed a mini-manicure, because it took about fifty minutes; Betty had a very pleasant time chatting to the artiste. At the end, the artiste advised Betty to be careful of her nails for the rest of the day, and not to wash in hard water.

So. A question. Why, when one’s nails are still soft, does one find that one bumps them into every little thing all the time? With a heightened sense of her nails, Betty still found it near-impossible to avoid denting them on the car key, or smacking them into the steering wheel, never mind the temptation to run them idly through her hair. It is a puzzling and yet intriguing somatic exercise, this polishing of the nails.