The Comeuppance.

If only The Comeuppance had Comeup at Christmas, it would have provided a lovely poetic symmetry to my thirty year-old tale of love, betrayal and loss. But perhaps that would make it all too pat. In fact, my comeuppance came in the sultry August of 1985. It is commemorated by a single sentence in my diary: "Vidal Sassoon disaster followed by M disaster."

I had graduated from University a few weeks earlier, having felt quite ready for the last few months of my academic life to flee the confines of student-hood, which had come to feel repetitive and suffocating. I'd read all I wanted to read (for the time being), been on all the demonstrations I felt passionate about (ditto), taken all the drugs I'd ever want to take (pretty much ever), and shagged everyone I'd wanted to (more or less). Student life had nothing more to offer me, and though I cried on the way home for the end of my youth, I was actually ready to enter the Next Phase.

Quite why I felt that 'entering the Next Phase' should mean 'grotesquely altering my appearance' I still do not know, but the urge was upon me to reinvent myself in any way I could, and this meant a radical change of hairstyle. I'd been blonde throughout University (as I am now, and intend to remain), and it had served me well, but as part of my reinvention I took myself off to Vidal Sassoon one afternoon and begged an eager young man to 'change my image'. This he did by dying my hair the colour of a rotted plum, and by hacking into it with psychotic abandon, shearing off my fringe so that my head at the end resembled a hand grenade. I remember staring at my newly-ludicrous appearance in the mirror, mute with shock and horror, while he repeatedly asked me "are you ok, Kolley? Are you ok?". Of course being English I numbly insisted that it was all fine, and tipped him a fiver while my eyes filled with tears.

On the Tube home I kept my head bowed at a 45 degree angle, trying to hide his dreadful handiwork and redundantly tugging what was left of my butchered fringe in an futile effort to make it grow back. I knew my mascara had run in black rivulets down my face, but felt spitting on a tissue and dabbing at it - my only option for any sort of removal - would render me even more pitiful and crazed in the eyes of anyone watching than the 'post-lobotomy chic' haircut already had. It wasn't until I stood up to change trains at Stratford, and briefly brought my swollen eyes up from the floor, that I noticed M had been sitting directly opposite me for the whole journey, and had stood up like me, to change trains. For the first time in years, our faces were six inches from each other again. I looked up into those lovely brown eyes, that were visibly widening as they took in the full grotesquery of my appearance, and saw the lightening spread of vindictive, schadenfreude-driven, completely justified pleasure there. I couldn't utter a word; he didn't need to. The doors opened, we both got off, and I shot to the far end of the platform like the Hounds of Hell were chasing me. Which, in a sense, they were.

And I haven't set eyes on him since. But if he's reading this I'd like him to know that my hair looks lovely now. Really good. And I weigh exactly the same as I did at nineteen (which, if gossip is to be believed, he certainly doesn't. But let us not dwell in vengeance.).

I think there's a certain tenuous Dickensian Morality flavour to this whole fable, so maybe I can rope it in at this point, link it loosely to Christmas or whatever it is you're celebrating at this time of year - if you feel the need to celebrate anything at all - and counsel all readers to try and be nice to each other in the year ahead. Because it'll come back to bite you if you're not, you can rely on that. I'm the living proof.

Thank you to those who still read my crap, mysterious lurkers and bold commentators alike. I'm buying you all a virtual pint (of whatever you like best, be it beer, blood or beetroot juice), and I'm raising it to you. Mwah!

©Kolley Kibber 2012. MY drivel.