‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, darling,’ Talitha said. ‘That’s not the point. The point is, I can’t put them back in for a week in case we missed any, because the nit cycle is a week. What am I going to do?’
She seemed suddenly to lose heart, looking at herself with nit oil smeared in her real hair. ‘Oh, good, I look a hundred years old. What is Sergei going to say? And I have to go on TV. Oh, darling, this is what I always feared would happen. I’ll get trapped on a desert island where they have no hair-extension specialist or Botox aesthetician and all my artifice will drain away.’
Trying not to think about my eighteenth-century wig theory, I pointed out that this was most unlikely to happen – no one looks at their best with their hair smeared down with hair-extension and nit oil – and washed Talitha’s hair and blow-dried it. Actually, she looked really sweet. It was all fluffy, like a little chicken.
‘I mean, the whole point about celebrities is that they change their look!’ I said encouragingly. ‘Look at Lady Gaga! Look at Jessie J. You could wear . . . a pink wig!’
‘I’m not Jessie J!’ said Talitha, at which Mabel, who had been watching solemnly, burst out, ‘Kerching, kerching! Berbling, berbling!’ while looking at us expectantly, as if we were going to say, ‘No, YOU are Jessie J!’ Then, crestfallen, she whispered, ‘Why does Talitha look so sad?’
Talitha surveyed our faces.
‘It’s all right, darlings,’ she said, as if we were both five-year-olds. ‘I’ll simply get some pieces put in at Harrods. They’ll come in useful later. As long as they don’t have nits in them.’
11.30 p.m. Talitha just texted: <Sergei loves my real hair. He’s completely turned on. Phew. I always thought he’d hate me if we were stuck on a desert island and he saw the ‘real me’.> – which is quite a sophisticated thing to say, because she was completely eradicating any sense of passive-aggressive guilt inducement, and actually making it seem as if I’d done her a favour.
Talitha really is a sophisticated human being. She has this theory about people who are in ‘primitive states’, i.e. they don’t really know how to behave.
Also am sure that if Talitha actually thought it was my fault, i.e. I’d knowingly hugged and nuzzled her, whilst aware I might have nits, without telling her I knew I might have nits, then she’d have been completely straight about it.
Tom texted: <Nits are definitely not the same as crabs, appear to have neither, and Arkis thinks it’s funny: bonding experience.>
Saturday 27 April 2013
Nits and nit eggs extracted 32, pounds forked out per dead nit ￡8.59.
Nit-nurse expedition was, as Billy put it, ‘extreme, extreme fun’ and everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Caring assistants, entirely swathed in white, sucked at all our hair with a vacuum, said they’d found nothing, and then blew us very fiercely with a very hot hairdryer. It was ‘extreme, extreme fun’, that is, until the bill came – 275 quid! We could all have gone to Euro Disney for that! – with the right amount of well-timed googling.
‘How does this actually work?’ I said. ‘Couldn’t I do it at home using the mini-vacuum, then blasting us all with a really hot hairdryer?’
‘Oh no,’ said the Celebrity Nit Nurse airily. ‘It’s all very specially designed. The vacuum comes from Atlanta, and the Heat Destroyer is made in Rio de Janeiro.’
FIRE! FIRE!
Wednesday 1 May 2013
Blimey. This morning, instead of staying in the bedroom when I went down to deal with the kids, Roxster said, ‘I think I should come down to breakfast.’
‘OK,’ I said, pleased, a little nervous in case a knife-wielding bloodbath broke out between the children, at the same time wondering if Roxster was driven by a desire to participate in family life, or simply the notion of food. ‘I’ll just get things ready, then come down!’