Winter: You Suck

As a species, I believe we are split into two firm categories – those who love summer, and those who love winter. I fall squarely into the former group, mainly out of a hatred for the nasties that winter brings. This is for a number of experience-based reasons.

For starters, getting soaked is something that should only happen by choice:

It is not a pleasant experience to be made dripping wet when you don’t expect it, and winter is an expert at exposing you to such horrors.

While rain can be an unpredictable beast at the best of times, in winter it manages to excel itself. While you assume an inconspicuous layer of white cloud in the sky means a rain free day awaits you, winter is planning how best to ensure your unplanned dampness. Without warning, the sky will darken into a writhing mass of the darkest grey cloud, awaiting the perfect moment to fling its wet arsenal at your unprepared body. 

For the last three days, winter’s perfect moment has been planned for the 15 second dash I have to make between the office and the car park. Maintaining a 100% record for each of my days at work this week, the sky had completed its transformation from friendly to threatening with half an hour of my day left to go, leaving ample time for the rain to start falling in a deluge that quite frankly, was unnecessary given that I had to go out in it.

Typically, I had wrongly assumed that I wouldn’t need any form of water-resistance device when I left the house that morning, but even if I had, there is no item of protection that would have been able to stand the aqua-laden onslaught I had to face to get back to my car. You see, the short journey from office to vehicle involves travelling between two buildings which, I have recently learnt, means the slightest breeze is transformed into a howling gale as it travels down the resulting tunnel. Science says that when you add water to such a scenario, you will get horizontal rain (actually, I don’t know if science does officially say that, but it has happened consistently this week so I’m running with it).

Horizontal rain is the worst kind of rain. Not only is it wet, it means that there is a lot of wind around in order to perpetuate its horizontalness. And I hate wind too.

Sitting next to each other in the alphabetically ordered list of weather, wind and winter have formed a strong friendship and go hand in hand everywhere they go. I always seem to forget about how much I hate wind until the final part of the year approaches and it raises its whirling head once again.

There is no protection you can take from it – it lives to ensure you look flapped and ruffled whenever you cross paths. It will blow plastic bags into your face, and leaves into your hair and there is nothing you can do about it.

Unless you stay inside of course, but that is a rather impractical attitude to take for an entire season (especially for me, given that we live at the top of a particularly blustery hill). But even if you did elect a complete avoidance tactic by hibernating in your lounge for several months, you would have to endure its constant whining as it performs laps of your house at top speed, knocking all your stuff over as it goes. There is no relief from the gusts of a potent wind, and that sucks.

Snow sucks too (I’m on a roll now). I used to love snow when I was a kid – hell, even when I was a student, waking up to the sight of a lightly dusted winter wonderland would never fail to put a smile on my face. I think mainly, this was because it never really snowed properly until last winter. For about a month, our road was covered in a slippery carpet of partly-melted-then-refrozen-again snow. Remember I said we lived at the top of a hill? Yeah, that came into play.

 

 

Last winter’s snow did indeed leave me having to plod up a hill barefooted because my heels did not succeed where the car tyres failed. I got home tired, miserable and worst (but most obvious) of all, I had cold feet. I’ll let you in on a little secret – it is impossible for me to be warm if my feet are cold, and walking directly on snow is not a recommended method for keeping the tootsies toasty.

While I will not deny that these are all things I seriously dislike about winter, they are mere inconveniences sent to challenge me every year rather than forming the real reason for my hatred of all things winter. The reason for dislike turning into hatred is simple.

Winter weather does horrible things to my hair.

Winter, you make my hair look bad. We were never destined to be friends.

Before I finish up here, I will begrudgingly admit to being a fan of the occasional positive point that winter brings. I have come up with a grand total of one so far. When it is cold outside, the water from the cold tap is refreshingly cold.

There you go, I said it. There is something good about winter.

But before you get carried away thinking that this could be the humble beginnings of a change in seasonal allegiance, I can reassure you that I can't help but see a negative to this single, lonesome positive. Because the colder water means it takes longer to boil when you’re gasping for a cup of hot, soul-warming tea. And I do hate being made to wait for a steaming hot cuppa.

Winter, you suck because you make my hair bad and you delay my tea drinking.

I rest my case.

Bridezilla Goes for a Bike Ride - and I talk about hair accidents

I am lucky enough to not have to work Mondays, and until recently, I mainly spent them with my mum, being a lady that lunches and shops and talks wedding stuff. However, like all good things, it couldn't last forever - Mum has changed job and she is working Mondays at the new place. I am delighted for her - she always jokingly said she wanted to work at this particular place (and there is a good chance they make wedding cakes, which is excellent news for me and Fiance) - but it does mean that I now need to find ways of entertaining myself.

Today for example, I have mainly been scoffing at the poor quality of daytime TV, whilst simultaneously talking myself out of cutting a fringe into my hair (which by the way, is finally moving away from black towards a very dark brown instead - albeit very slowly). I know the sensible thing is to book myself an appointment at the hairdressers and let a professional do it, but that means enduring the mind-numbing conversation that neither of us particularly wishes to make, with the alternative being a very lengthy awkward silence if one does attempt a jabber-free wash and chop. So I have been putting that off for about... well about a year, in all honesty. But I would like a new fringe to accompany the new colour and as a result, I have only just managed to manhandle my willpower into agreeing that it is potentially a very bad idea to do it myself. This is hopefully a sign that I am finally learning some things are best left to the people who know what they're doing.

While the majority of my hair experiments have gone as planned, there are plenty in the back catalogue that have not. Like when teenage me decided that my addiction to Sun In should finally came to an end after a year and a half, and that an autumnal brown would be a much better colour instead. The very blond shade of blond that I had achieved from the lightening spray did not go autumnal brown. It went pillar box red.

That was my first ever self created hair error. I thought I would learn.

I did not. A few years of brown/black later, I decided wanted to be blond again. Hey I'd done it before, everything would be fine, right? Wrong. The last colour hadn't completely faded, but had started to grow out, which left a rather unusual result on my head. Not unexpected, now I apply logic and hindsight to the situation, but at the time I was horrified to see myself in the mirror sporting a white blond one inch strip where the naturally coloured roots had been, the remainder presenting itself as bright bright orange, and the entirety adopting a texture that can only be described as reminiscent of a straw bale.

At least if it was all one colour it would have been consistent, no matter how awful. But it felt like that white stripe was there to spite me, to remind me how stupid I was to think I was able to handle such a drastic change by myself.

Despite my own personal mishaps however, it was an incident that happened to a school friend of mine that really set the smackdown on my 'gah, do it, cut yourself a fringe' attitude. Realising her fringe was due a cut, and rather than mentioning it to her mum in order to get a trip to the hairdressers sorted, she decided to do it herself. And she sneezed just as she put scissor to hair.

While I am still not sure I have entirely quashed the voice that says 'just do it' , this tale in particular has kept me on the straight and narrow. For today anyway.

And now that my disasters are out of the way, it's on to see what is awaiting Bridezilla today as she goes for a bike ride. Things will go wrong, but at least her hair doesn't appear to have suffered any disasters...

Bridezilla Goes to a Gig - and my hair changes colour!

I'm pretty lazy when it comes to my hair. It sits there on top of my head, and tends to be not very exciting. But about once a year I decide to do something about it - usually as an effort to cheer myself up as autumn approaches - so I went and bought myself a hair dying kit and set to work. Being of a rather mousey brown shade naturally, I thought a couple of shades darker would do the trick nicely and opted to buy the very safe sounding 'Natural Dark Brown'. This is what I thought was going to happen:

 

This is not what I now look like. Admittedly, this is probably entirely my own fault for not reading the instructions properly, and racing ahead and slapping the bottle onto bone dry hair rather than the very clearly-specified-in-the-directions wet hair. The end result is a colour that is definitely not natural dark brown:

I have got black hair. I don't dislike it - in fact, I have actively chosen to turn my hair black before - but it is not the colour I chose this time and I therefore consider it a faux pas. A permanent faux pas that sits on top of my head, and hopefully reminds me of the importance of following instructions carefully. They are there for a reason.

So now today's little ramble is out of the way, it's time to head onwards to the latest edition of Bridezilla - this time she is off to a gig, and is sadly afflicted by the same issues that I encounter when I go to watch a favourite band play...