There comes a point, when everything around you feels like it’s falling apart, that you look in the mirror and say, “The only way out of this is blonde.” Which is how I came to meet Diane, who’s a bit like Cinderella’s fairy godmother only more magic.
She swept up, looking like a goddess, in a white Range Rover. Out of which she unloaded numerous giant suitcases and dragged them into the house — suitcases which she unwrapped and unscrewed and turned, in seconds, like a boy’s transformer toy, into a portable hairdressing salon. Triple mirrors and a tray on legs, backwash stands. Blink, and I was in a salon.
Then she looked over my shoulder into the mirror, recognised a Cinders in sackcloth and ashes when she saw one, and announced that she was going to sort me out. “Blonde,” she said. It wasn’t a question. Open-mouthed — for Diane is not only gorgeous, she’s a force of nature — I totally succumbed. “Yes, please,” I said.
Just to explain. A while ago, since the byline picture you see was taken, I was persuaded by a hairdresser to stop the highlights. He is a top stylist, and he changed my look to elegant and brown. Which was great, but it meant travelling into the city, finding parking, and this became too much. I stopped going, started cutting my own hair and swiftly came to resemble Iris Murdoch on a bad day.
“You’ll love Diane. She’s an absolute scream,” my friend the fixer had said. She’d been trying to find someone to come and cheer me up, hair-wise, for ages, and when her own hairdresser started home visits, all fell into place.
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It’s all about faith, going blonde. Faith that your hairdresser will not go too far. Faith they’ll come back when the highlights grow out. Faith they’ll… well, get it: grasp that basically your life is rubbish and you just need a little morale lift.
As we talked into the mirror, I couldn’t escape comparisons between her face and mine. She looks like a celebrity: flawless skin, perfect make-up and bright teeth. I haven’t encountered anyone as well groomed at close quarters since I left the normal world — it was dazzling. Even Dave, the old smoothie, was silenced.
As she chatted, and she is very funny, she mentioned something about getting her eleven redone. “Your eleven?” I was baffled. She pointed to the flawless area between her eyebrows. I still didn’t twig. She meant her non-existent frown lines. “A girl needs her eleven done,” she declared.
Thing is, Diane’s lovely inside too — she’s experienced personal tragedy; she’s wise. She recommends panda videos as the best cure for depression. No one, she says, can watch and not feel better. I’d say the same of her. I looked in the mirror later and felt like someone had switched on a lightbulb inside me: being blonde made me feel younger, brighter, less unattractive, less haggard. A sliver of old me had reappeared.
Her impact was such that what I did next quite amazed me. At the dentist for a check-up, I saw an offer on teeth whitening paste. “Could I?” I asked him. Was paste less barbaric? Would it hurt less than
being zapped by lasers, which I had to quit immediately and agony persisted for weeks?
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You can guess the result. Every night now, with a great deal of dark amusement, I find myself doing a devilish hand therapy exercise — squeezing tiny globs of hydrogen peroxide from a syringe into dimples in a teeth mould. I fall asleep, the moulds in place, aware of the sheer silliness of it all when my body only moves to spasm and my insides are wretched. And then every morning I haul myself into a wheelchair and grin at a chronic cripple with big blonde hair and a smile half a shade whiter than it was. (And that’s only ten days. Thirty and it’s Hollywood.)
Feeling good matters, even if a girl’s a lost cause. As the line on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album goes, “They’ll stone you and then say you are brave/ They’ll stone you when you are set down in your grave.” After the light hair and the teeth, just maybe the eleven — it might work as well as the last Botox, which stopped my thighs scissoring. After that it’s panda videos.
@Mel_ReidTimes
Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in 2010
