EYEBROWS

Well it’s Birthday Week around these parts and I’m going on about my eyebrows.

“I’m definitely going to blog about my eyebrows,” I said to Sammy. She didn’t respond. I took that as approval.

Here’s the thing. When I was young, I had lovely soft brown eyebrows and they did their job magnificently - keeping sweat from pouring into my eyes and basically defining the shape of my little face.

Then… I got to the age of about 40 and suddenly… suddenly, it was as though my eyebrows had decided it was time to really live. Oh, life begins at 40 said everyone; yeah. My eyebrows took it seriously… and literally sprouted into life.

So now, they’re bushy. They seem to need regular topiary, like two privet hedges, and if they’re not kept kempt (kempt - that’s a word isn’t it?) they just shoot literally all over the place and make me look like some sort of bespectacled owl.

It gives the barber a bit more to do. It used to be that I could just say ‘Yeah, two on the sides and a little longer on the top please’ and then pass the time staring at the reflection of myself getting my hair cut.

Nowadays, I’m just counting the minutes until he says something like, “Do you want eyebrows done?” and then I have to say “Sure” and then he has to get the clippers buzzing and then snippets of long hairs start tumbling past my eyes. Oh, and then he looks quizzically at me in the mirror and just knowingly says: “Ears?” and I make a sort of resigned face and nod.

And why is that there are one or two hairs that are disproportionately longer than the others? That doesn’t make sense - like one particular follicle gets a super-dose of the bush-producing hormone, while all the others get instructions to just grow in whichever direction they like, all at once.

So. It’s my birthday this week. And more importantly it’s Sammy’s too. She’s a lot better at celebrating the now rather than looking back to the time when our eyebrows behaved themselves. Ha! And people think I’m wise! (Probably the eyebrows)