who,what,why....whatever!

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Mane & Tail

As well as ministering to patients needs much time at work is also spend talking. The nurses I work with are from various parts of the world – so I have over the years obtained a diverse, albeit somewhat obscure knowledge of life in the Philippines, India, Germany, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Always keen to embrace new cultures I enthusiastically devour pakora and all manner of other exotic delights (admittedly, perhaps this is motivated by greed rather than cultural enlightenment) and I have acquired an eclectic knowledge of useless words in various languages. However one thing I have been more reticent about trying is horse shampoo. For 4 years my Filipino colleagues have been looking at my much maligned hair, lifting up its limp strands and letting out sighs. They have not been shy in letting me know their despair. But Mane and Tail they said would be the answer to all my problems. Although I have to admit I have come to think that my hair is more of a problem to them than me. I am resigned I will never have beautiful, long, silky locks, Mane and Tail or not.

Still ,when one of my friends excitedly gave me a bottle of Mane and Tail they’d bought for me from the Philippines excitement took hold. Perhaps I would be soon joined the ranks of glossy manes afterall.

As to be expected Mane and Tail came in an unassuming bottle – no packaging pretences and did look as if it would be more at home in a tack room than at the end of my bath. Still, reassuringly, it did have instructions for human use on the bottle. Interestingly it looked and smelt like bog standard shampoo. The cynic in me thinking this was perhaps some double bluff marketing ploy.

So in I went to work this morning with my newly washed Mane and Tail hair. After 5 minutes of shaking my head around no one had noticed and I was getting despondent and dizzy. I then opted for the more direct approach asking them if it looked different. Apparently not, although they reassured me it takes more than one day, especially in hair of my condition.

Then.. shock horror, someone did comment on how nice my hair looked. Now obviously this could be a set up, but no, it was a doctor who had not been privy to the Mane and Tail saga. Basking in the unfamiliar glow of such comments I trotted off to my desk, giving my hair a little shake as I went. It was all I could do to stop myself whinnying.

Tomorrow brings day 2 of Mane and Tail. Perhaps by the end of the week I will have mane like hair. Though I’ve been thinking back to my days of horse riding. From what I remember manes were made of thick wiry hair. Is this really something I aspire to?

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Whiskey marmalade & the bridging region

I find myself every so often buying a copy of Cosmopolitan. An irony, as I am the antithesis of the cosmopolitan woman. Sometimes I just want to peer in and voyeuristically flick through the pages of that world.

So it was I settled down yesterday to read the March edition. With the front cover shouting the following how could I fail to get excited;

35 real men get nakedThis actually did little to get me excited. I am a nurse and spend my days up to my armpits in naked men of the real variety. Seeing the male member day in day out bathed in the soft disinfected luminance of the hospital lighting disengages any such desire.

Love your body fashion updatesI did wonder whether I could perhaps learn a few pointers from these pages. I have to confess my criteria for clothing tends to be comfort first and foremost. Occasionally I do wonder if the other half would like to see me dressed in a slinky little number and prancing around in high heels, as opposed to my smock top and timberland boots. Testing the waters on potential suitable attire, I passed the magazine over to him, open on a fashion page bearing a very leggy blonde wearing a denim shorted jumpsuit. From his 5 minutes of hysterical laughter I gathered he thought that perhaps this was not my look.

As he kindly put it: “We’re not built like this,” obviously including himself in the generalisation designed to water down the blow.

To give him credit, having seen the crestfallen look on my face he overcame his choking and sudden nervousness to continue an explanation: “You see,” he said pointing at her lean brown thighs, “her legs don’t touch at all, they’re just long and don’t even meet at the top, they are joined by that little bridging region.”

I for one have no idea what ‘bridging region’ means anatomically speaking. He continued, starting to feel brave: “Our legs join slightly below the bridging region so these sort of shorts just ride up and look rubbish.”

At this point, realising the truth in his wisdom, I realised that it was perhaps time to move on. Though making a mental note to find out whether “bridging region” was some recognised euphemism I was unfamiliar with.

Hottest sex moves everAdmittedly I did spend a few moments on these pages. But when mouthfuls of whiskey were mentioned along with flaccid members I flicked over – the closest thing I had to this was whiskey marmalade and somehow I didn’t think it would be a suitable substitute for what they had in mind.

There had been momentary excitement when I turned a page to find some of my favourite beauty products carefully arranged alongside a three page article, but this was short lived when I realised it was referring to products of the last century.

So it was that 20 minutes later I had reached the end of the magazine feeling no more enlightened than I had previously. Cosmopolitan remains as much of an enigma as ever and to be honest, I’m grateful for the fact that my personality cannot be moulded and defined by 232 pages of a glossy magazine.