Little Boy Blue

Pretty girls smile at me in the street.

There’s not a man alive who wouldn’t be thrilled if that happened to them, and every time it does I do feel thrilled for the split second it takes me to remember that they are smiling because I have blue hair.

It’s one more thing I didn’t consider when I decided to do this Shave or Dye thing. My workmates think it’s great (I’ve had to email for more sponsorship cards, I think I’m going to raise over fifteen hundred euro) and my family think it’s funny. Everything would therefore be ideal if I had some Star Trek way of beaming from home to the office, but I don’t. I have to catch buses, I have to pass people from other floors on the office stairs, I have to walk the streets of the city centre.

So when I say pretty girls smile at me in the street I’m being selective. So do many other people, though others just go for open-mouthed staring.

I am typing this on the bus home at the moment and a guy sitting in the seat across the aisle keeps looking up from his paper directly at me. I know this via my peripheral vision, which has improved greatly over the last two days, along with my hearing. For example, as I passed three lads smoking outside McDonalds today my peripheral vision was so good that I could still see them staring at me after I’d passed, as if I could see through the back of my own head, and I was at least fifty yards away when  I heard one of them mutter “wouldya look at the colour of that ****’s hair” (my asterisks this time, not his).

I am not, of course, the first person on earth to dye their hair bright blue, but it’s normally done by young people. So most people approaching me pretty well ignore my hair until they see the age of the face that it’s surrounding, and it’s then that their expression changes.

I suppose it is a bit unsettling. It’s like a giant cake arriving at your stag party, and your granny jumping out of it.