The king is going, going, going

Having suffered more than 24 hours in the role of a Donald Trump tribute act, I had decided yesterday to do something about it. I like to think I am not a vain man, but we each have our thresholds and, with the orange hair and dubious cut, mine had been crossed.

I spent much of the day indoors, trying to write, obsessing about whether my hair was really that bad (it was), and so by the time 2.30 came, I was fidgety and irritable, suffering from a self-inflicted case of cabin fever, and ready to face the music.

My mood had not been helped by the news coming out of Liverpool. Jürgen Klopp, quite possibly the best manager in the Premier League (I’m not counting that fraud Guardiola who has neither the integrity nor the balls to acknowledge decades of financial doping – I’d like to see him cope with a team featuring Rickie Lambert and Jordon Ibe), had chosen this moment to announce he would be leaving the club at the end of the season. How do you go about replacing the irreplaceable? I’m sure there will be plenty more for me to say about that in the near future, but it would be weird to not acknowledge it affected my mood. (Selfish bastard – did he even for one second consider what I was going through today? No. Typical. Put someone on a pedestal for nearly a decade and they treat you like this!)

Anyway. The sun was shining, but there was still that unquestionable difference between the temperature in the sun and the shade. So I walked over the road to the questionably named “HairMagic Calypso” in a state of some anxiety, and wearing my newly acquired NY Yankees hat pulled down over my ears. I was also wearing a hoodie in case a seagull came swooping down to steal the beanie. I’d survived until now without overt ridicule, there was no point taking any unnecessary risks at this stage of the proceedings.

I needn’t have worried. Faced with a man wearing jeans, a tee-shirt, a sweater, an oversized beanie pulled down to his nose, and a hoodie, the staff at the salon weren’t going to be fazed by neon-orange hair. When I say “staff”, there were two of them, both English, a mother and daughter team. Whereas I would normally run a mile from an English-run establishment on the Costa del Sol, beggars can’t be choosers. As it happened, they were lovely, which made up for the customers.

“Oh here you,” said Charlotte, the daughter. “It’s not that bad. God, you are dramatic, aren’t you? It’s an easy fix – my mum’ll do it for you in no time. And you don’t look like Donald Trump at all – more like that other fella, what’s his name, mum? The funny one?”

“Lucille Ball?” said one of the customers, a somewhat geriatric crone who, I was pleased to see, was on her way out.

“Nahow, not her, she’s a woman, the other one, you know mum. Dresses like a Scotsman. Russ Abbott, that’s him. Anyway love,” she said, turning back to me, “we’ll have you right as rain – although I can’t say that here, hasn’t rained in a long time – but you’ll be right as rain in no time.”

With that, she turned back to her job, leaving me to the ministrations of her mother – Tracey – and the questioning of another customer sat in the chair next to me.

“Why did you get that done, then? Did you pay for it?”

Thankfully after a good 30 minutes of questioning, offering advice to Tracey – “use the ash colour love, it’ll hide the red better” – wanting to know why Trudeau was still in power, and giving some rather useful pointers as to how the World Economic Forum was in fact planning to take over the world and had done some “horrible, horrible things over the past two years – all that vaccination, that’s them”, she left, taking her botox-injected bottom lip with her, and leaving a trail of perfume so cheap that even my Covid-damaged olfactory sense could pick it up.

“Sorry about that, love,” said Tracey. “I don’t normally like to talk about customers, but she gets right on my tits, she does. Thinks she’s a hairdresser, a politician, and the Queen of bloody Sheba. God help us all.”

I knew things would be alright then, so I let her get on with it. As it happened, it was a reasonably straightforward fix. Just one session of the dye to cover up the ginger, and then a few highlights to make it look as if I wasn’t trying to copy the Queen of Sheba and be mutton dressed as lamb. Within an hour and a half, I was back on the streets, hoodie and beanie in hand, hair coloured to a shade one more frequently associates with humans, and cut to dimensions that will please the Ottawackers left back in Ottawa.

And then I went home to Skype with Mrs. Ottawacker and give her the good news.

In the evening, I decided to go out for dinner and have a cooked meal for once, so I wandered onto the strip and stopped at the “Mausi Café”, a Spanish place I’d not been to before. And won’t be in again.

Liking the English, not liking Spanish cooking… maybe I’ve had a stroke.