For weeks I thought I had hair growing on the left side of my left eye. When I tried to look directly at it, I couldn’t see it, but as soon as I stopped looking, I could see it. It’s just not in focus. Unconfirmed. Looking in the mirror didn’t help because my hair was so mean. I knew that. It hid.
I asked friends, family, work colleagues, and strangers on the street if they could see their hair. No, it’s impossible, everyone said, and some of them backed away for some reason. Then the hypochondriac taxi driver said that, medically speaking, it could be heart disease or polio, it could be a sign of something bad, and I can’t remember, but maybe I should get it checked out. I did.
As soon as I got off the taxi, I looked it up on the internet to find out what it meant when I thought I had hair in my eyes but it didn’t. This was a mistake. There were no comments on the internet about the polio eye, but it was thought that it might be a corneal ulcer or a scratch on the pupil. Or it could be dry eye syndrome, which is bad, but I definitely cried when I hit my groin with a cricket ball on Sunday. Blepharitis? Pterygium? Or even worse, Pinguecula? (Untreated, it can cause flashbacks to early parenting.) Whatever it is, the internet thought I should go to Specsavers.
I was about to, but when I looked into Harriet’s special/scary makeup mirror, it turned out to be none of the above. It was an eyebrow, but it was unlike any eyebrow I had ever seen.
When I let my hair loose, it was easily about two inches long, but my hair didn’t like being let loose. Left alone, there were two advantageous positions. At first, it bellowed back to the rest of my eyebrows as if nothing was wrong. In the next moment, it went straight up towards the ears, then down to eye level, and then back up again, giving the user the impression that hair was coming out of the eyes. Most despicably, if someone threatens discovery, be it a friend, family member, or a stranger on the street, it can revert back to position one. It took until this week for the operation to catch it.
Obviously I’m relieved it’s not Pingu Eye, but maybe I’m too young to go full Dennis Healy? Is this the first of many 2-inch eyebrows, future Christmas eyebrows, or just an outlier? Don’t answer that.
What is clear now is that things are not going to get better. Shaving isn’t the same anymore. The parts of the face remain unchanged – in some places there is no stubble at all, in others there is a five o’clock shadow – but under the chin there is an area that has taken over the strength of an iron beam. Razor blades are not effective. The fact that it has become difficult to access for some reason doesn’t help. “You have a noisy jaw,” Harriet says, unsympathetically.
Last year, the hair in my nostrils turned white, probably in conjunction with some, but not all, patchy stubble. The new white fur is much thicker than the old brown fur. Using a nose hair trimmer is like trying to cut through a fishing net with a lawnmower. A hedge trimmer would be better, but it doesn’t fit into the nostril.
There is one small consolation to this physical decline. I don’t have any back hair yet. Unfortunately, it’s only a matter of time. I have a friend who is 10 years older than me, but in all other structural respects we are the same. I’m keeping this friendship purely so I know what happens. For decades, he had no back hair at all, but in his mid-50s, perhaps overnight, during a full moon, everything changed. He had his wife shave off some of his thick new fur, which worked as expected. Now he has given up. At least you don’t need a rug for your picnic anymore.
I spent a painful amount of time as a teenager praying for more body hair. Oh, Lord, a couple more on my chest, and anything under my armpits…and for the love of God, there. Well, in 5 minutes your back hair countdown will start and you will have to look up to shave. That was fast. Exclude …
“Where are the nail clippers?” asks Harriet.
“It’s in the nail clipper drawer,” she answered unhelpfully.
With just one cut, your unusually long eyebrows will disappear. It was unusual and disappeared in the blink of an eye. I stopped the march of time. Let’s never talk about this again.
Good news!
Scientists say the ozone layer is on track to fully recover by 2066. A hole in the layer of gas that surrounds the Earth and absorbs most of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation was discovered in 1985. A hole opens in Antarctica every August, but this year it took longer to form and is 18.5 million square kilometers smaller than expected. . The cure was aided by the phasing out of CFCs (chemicals containing chlorine, fluorine, and carbon atoms) from 1987.
