Monthly competition- November 2024

This is not my take on the headline, but I’ve posted it here because I could not come up with anything more ludicrous.

“Short hair hints may be ‘sabotage” study finds.

Publishing her research on the ’Science Direct’ website, under the heading  ‘Personality and individual Differences’  Danielle Sulikowski details how women were asked to give advice to clients at a hypothetical hairdressing salon. From the high proportion of suggestions for a shorter haircut, whether or not the client was known to them, she deduced that competitive women saw shorter hair as sufficiently less attractive than long to more likely recommend  shorter haircuts in an attempt to reduce the number of attractive women  and increase their chance of success in the fields of love and status. Sulikowski states ‘What seems like it might be  a flippant topic is actually quite serious.’ [140 words]

Argus 26 November 2024

Brighton man grows hair for five years for special reason.

I remember the blonde hair on the windowsill. My hair’s brown, so it must have come from Taz. Her hair is, or was, I should say, long, and rich, and blonde. Curious, I ran my fingers through my hair a few times and then examined what had come loose. Not a lot, which is good. Just one. Nothing special about it but I remember staring at it in my hand and experiencing what was, I suppose, a wow moment, although at the time it was an ooh-what’s-that? moment. There was a difference between the two. It was as if mine had more substance, even a sparkle. For some reason I put it down carefully next to Taz’s.

Later I remembered what I’d done and dug out my magnifying glass from its dusty drawer in the garage. Taz’s hair: long, straight, shiny. Mine: shorter, duller. But… it was different. Definitely a curious texture: an uneven quality, too miniscule to make out even with my glass. Taz has, had, a jeweller’s loupe, one of those little lens jobbies with forty-times magnification. I fetched it from her hobby box and took a squint. OK, we were nearer to “wow”. Still tiny, and on the limit of what I could make out, but there was definitely some kind of geometry and structure going on along the length of the hair. And sparkles or something.

I bought a microscope. Not a good one, but it could do five thousand times, it said. It took a day to arrive from Amazon.

‘What’s that?’ asked Taz.

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘I always fancied a go. It was only cheap.’

Then I really had my wow moment.

Wow!

Little buildings. Five thousand times was hopelessly blurry, and dim, even with a torch pointed at the microscope mirror. But at five hundred times I could see tiny, little, buildings. Like boxes with bridges between them. And lights. Some of the boxes had sparkles of light coming from them. But the truly heart-stopping thing, as I wound the magnification up, past a thousand, and on, I’m not certain, mind, but there were times when I thought I could see movement. Maybe something hurrying over a bridge. Perhaps a head eclipsed a sparkle, briefly.

Of course, I knew I could never cut my hair again. Or wash it. And I’d have to learn to sleep sitting up.

Taz left me after six months.

‘You need help,’ she said.

She was right, of course. It’s harder to sleep sitting up than you’d imagine.

So, I learned a fair bit about them over the years. Oh, “them”, the hair builders and their little ways. I bought a better microscope. I found different hairs had different shaped buildings. Some of “them” seemed to migrate from hair to hair. In October 2023, my hair blew into my eyes, and I stepped in front of a bus. Woke up in hospital. They had shaved my head. I never saw “them” again.

495 words

Sea,  I well remember, a couple of years ago admiring your shorter haircut when you picked me up at Markinch station, Promise I wasn’t thinking of the competition we might meet at Craigievar! I did hope to do something more inspired for this great prompt, but ran out of mental space, so well done Ath. (and yes, I got ????)

Thanks Seagreen. Glad you laughed. Well, Terrie, there’s a coincidence. I’ve barely been able to write for the last month having been fitting our new kitchen. Completely new from top to bottom including having to rebuild joists under the floor and fit a kitchen to an accuracy of 1mm per metre. As I’ve never done anything to that accuracy except by accident, there have been plenty of head in hands moments. (Had to be that accurate for the quartz worktop fitters). Took a day off for the comp.