The holidays are DONE, thank god, or will be, as soon as I take down the decorations and tidy up the house. Right now, I’m just having a cup of coffee and roasting an aubergine, after roasting a bunch of peppers, and prior to slow-roasting some cherry tomatoes with za’atar. Phil’s back on the road for work, poor guy, and although I miss having him around already, I do feel a sense of relief about having nobody but myself to feed for a couple of days. (See above, roasted fruits and veggies.)

I am knackered. It was a busybusybusy holiday season, and for the last three weeks or so, I have mostly been working flat-out. Other than being tired, I am full of the new year’s vigour, and eager to get on with my various house-related projects, to get back to running, after a long break (two injuries in quick succession knocked me out of a promising start last year), and to branch out into some new interests, mainly artistic. While I’m pretty sick of cooking right now, and will enjoy a couple of days of salads and poached eggs, and all the vegetables, all the time, my interest in cooking in general has been rejuvenated. I am also feeling good about this blog, and will start tearing into plans for that. Phil’s been reading up on photography, I am looking into styling, and as once upon a time, I was a graphic designer, maybe it’s time for me to get back into that, because while I like a pretty spare and simple blog format, this one is flat-out amateurish.

All this, and as far as I know, nobody is reading, which is OK with me! I’ve journaled all my life, and don’t need an audience, although if one develops, or you’re reading this, feel free to say hello.

…and then I took a break from writing, tore down all the Xmas stuff, gave the house a lick-and-a-promise, went out, paid bills, had my hair cut (big change; several inches off the ends, and a fringe cut into it!), bought the flowers I’ve been promising myself as soon as I’d de-Xmas’d the house, bought more vegetables, came home, ate roasted vegetables, and a salad as big as the Ritz. So my day was plenty busy, but the point is, I didn’t have to rush.

I lucked into a really good hair stylist at Andrew Collinge on Castle Street in Liverpool. I’d been there once before, and the woman who worked on my hair that time was good, but dammit all if I could remember her name, so I ended up just going with the stylist who was available, and I liked him a lot! I usually suck at making small talk with hair stylists, which may be why I can go years without getting a real cut, but once I’d decided on the fringe, I knew I was committing to frequent trims, and getting on so well with the guy was a relief. So now I have a hair guy, yay!

Assuming, of course, he doesn’t move on in the next six-to-eight weeks, and I don’t go back to my previous method of fringe maintenance — the nail scissors. To be fair, I’ve had a fringe for more of my life than not, despite a couple of long spells of fringelessness, and I can do a decent-enough job of maintaining it myself, but as a grown-up ladyperson, really, I need to get over it and just get pro cuts more frequently. God knows my beat-up ends were an ongoing disaster, and even though I am loath to cut even a few centimetres off my hair, it just looks so much better when the ratty bits are gone. Bonus: I asked him how my natural colour was holding up, and if he saw much grey, and he just laughed and said he saw no grey at all. None. Given how old I’ve been feeling I look of late, that was heartening. And a fringe is better than Botox, as far as I’m concerned. Once the fringe settles down, that is, and quits trying to split along my old part.

It felt pretty good, after letting my self-care go all to hell during the Tapastravaganza, to do something like that for myself. The sheer luxury of having somebody else wash my hair almost made me giddy, to the point where I am thinking a wash-and-blow-out at our local Andrew Collinge Graduates place might be a nice treat every once in a while. Next up, on the self-care list: getting my eyebrows done, and buying some new make-up, instead of continuing to scrape the bottoms of my old containers. I have scaled way back on my make-up use as I get older, not because I don’t give a damn anymore, but because I find what is evidently the new standard (serious contouring, false eyelashes, terrifyingly defined brows, thick, heavy, eye shadow and liner) utterly intimidating. I am incredibly angular, something I discovered after losing a lot of weight, and the last thing I need is fucking contouring.

I am unused to this new face of mine. The softness is gone, I look my age, and there are all those hollows and planes I frankly don’t really know how to work with. Having the fringe back, though, made me somewhat more recognisable to myself. I remember that fringe; that fringe was omnipresent until my late 20s, came back in my early 30s, disappeared again in the mid-30s, came back in my late 30s and the first couple of years of my 40s, then went away for six years. I’ve only had short hair for a few brief periods in my life, and it felt weird, and I went back to long as fast as I could grow it out again, and now, as the slide into proper middle-age continues, I don’t give a shit what anybody says; I like it long, and anybody who thinks it’s inappropriate can kiss my ass.

The new hair must make me look younger, though, because I got checked out more today than I have in a while. Either that, or I was just feeling confident and sassy enough to draw more attention than usual. Good to know I’m not quite invisible yet, at least not all the time.