Blonde expressions...

I had a bath at the cottage on Sunday evening. I don’t take many baths in Wales preferring the speed and efficiency of the shower, but for a change on Sunday I decided upon a bath – and a nice large glass of Australian Cabernet Sauvignon to accompany my bath time fun and my rubber ducks.

Thing is I’m finding it harder to get in the bath these days and it isn’t just because of my increasing girth. These days the bath is surrounded by countless bottles of shampoo, in fact hair care product covers just about every available bathroom surface. It’s a teenage girl thing, and my daughter is a teenage girl with serious hair concerns - it's either too straight, too curly, too blond, not blond enough, too frizzy, not frizzy enough... what would she do with her time if she was bald I wonder?

So our bathroom in Wales resembles the hair care aisle at Wilkinson's - although, on inspection, it seems that none of the imaginatively curved, brightly coloured, plastic bottles seem to hold anything as mundane as boring old shampoo. These containers could be straight out of a Harry Potter book– they aren't shampoos at all, they are Elixirs, Sources, Treatments, Programmes, Extracts and Potions - nothing as simple as a shampoo for just washing your hair. Professor Snape would be proud to have them in his storeroom.

When I was a boy, in the days of the nit nurse, it was simply Vosene or Cussons, although at Christmas you might be treated to some Matey shampoo – making bath time ‘a bubble of fun’. I remember on more than one occasion having my hair washed in washing up liquid because we’d run out of real shampoo. Mind you, back then pretty much all bubbly liquids were made from the same batch of detergent (according to Stinks, my physics master) and they probably still are. The difference is that these days they are given fancy names by celebrity hair dressers charging fortunes for a tiny drop of extract of walnut / monkey gland / sage / alo vera / David Beckham.

Here are just some of the names given to the collection that surrounded me during my weekend bathtime soak:

‘Blonde Expressions’ - Now I wonder what those expressions are – ‘Dunno?’, ‘Not sure?’, ‘I don’t understand.’ – and I wonder if there are shampoos for other hair colours – ‘Red Reactions’ for bad-tempered redheads, or ‘Brunette Philosophising’ for that very clever (but plain) girl with the dark hair, maybe even ‘Mousey Mumblings’ for girls too shy to speak up.

‘Full Recovery’ - This is the one to use after a few too many alcopops, or is ‘Full Recovery’ really an alcopop dressed up in shampoos clothing, a sort of hair of the dog for your hair - or should that be dog of your hair for your dog?

‘Dazzling Shine’ – Now this one seems pretty straightforward until you read on – ‘Get that One in a Million Shine.’ Mmmm, one in a million – so that would indicate that for every million people using this product only one of them will get a dazzling shine. So what will the other 999,999 get - a dull dullness maybe?

‘Seductively Straight’ - I could read all sorts of innuendo into this if I really wanted, but for now let’s just say that I won’t - it wouldn’t be the PC thing to do.

And finally, and to combat ‘Seductively Straight’ – ‘It’s a Curl Thing’ - Now that you’ve finished shampooing your hair to get it seductively straight it’s time for a new curly look, and whilst we’re about it let’s chuck an appalling play-on-words for good measure…What do you mean ‘I don’t understand’?

Oh, I see – you’ve been using the Blonde Expressions again haven’t you and it seems to have really worked this time...I don’t understand indeed.