I feel I’m being overshadowed by my hair. Not literally, of course. There’s not enough of it there to do that. Not since Friday. Since taking to it with the clippers and strimming it down to a narrow mohawk it’s the first thing peoples eyes rise to. It keeps the seat oppostie me on the train empty, and it’s become something of an office project.

K wants to see it turn green, or perhaps red like a strange organic traffic light. It won’t. She also wants me to grow a thin matching stripe on my chin and upper lip, which I’ve promised to give two weeks. Already, though, four days in, it’s scratchy and a little uncomfortable, and I find myself playing with the little tuft below my lower lip with my top front teeth.

Of course, being off work from Monday I’ll be out of the office when the two week deadline expires, so I’ll have to either live with it a few days longer, or take a picture to email in. If I do, there’s little doubt it will be been transformed into an A3 poster and attached to some obvious wall near my desk. So far I’ve got off lightly, but the cleaners have just taken down our sticky-tape wall of pictures, and the Frame of Shame has been empty for a while now.

Ho hum.

There seems to have been confusion all day over whether or not we are actually at war. The BBC News site has been decidedly slow about updating itself, and for several hours its headline story didn’t seem to change one jot, regardless of the fact that downstairs on the large plasma screens in reception Sky News was whipping itself into a frenzy over the initial movement of American troops into the demilitarised zone on the Iraqi border.

Perhaps this is the BBC’s way of showing that in this conflict it has no intention of presenting speculation as fact. While it may make it look like a reliable broadcaster, it also makes it look slow, slow, slow.

By this evening, the Standard’s headline was ‘War has started’. The banner across the top of the page reported special troops figiting in Basra. Got home to reports that in actual fact nothing has happened beyond the kind of bombing Britain and America seem to consider ‘normal’.

Gymmed on the way back, adding some extra lengths onto my swim routine, while cutting the time by another minute. It helps when the pool is empty and you don’t have to swim around other people, but I have proved (to myself) once and for all that it is easier to swim towards the men’s changing room than the women’s. I had thought it was psychological, but it seems not. Womens to mens take three strokes less than mens to womens. There must be a current.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2003 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Journal, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.