Love is all around

It’s spring! The season in Wellington where your hair will be blown from your scalp! Where daffodils, anemones and other soft-stalked, tremulous flowers push their way out of the soil, at the same time small branches are snapped from trees, skid along the roads and blow under the wheels of your car. Where your dog’s nose leads the way on walks, the rest of him a rippling mess of fur. Where, once the rubbish truck pulls away, empty wheelie bins topple over all along the street, forming a strange, horizontal guard of honour.

Spring! Where there are only nine days to go until your scaffolding comes down! A season of renewal, gleaming fresh paint, a cleaned-out bank account, tūī glugging from kōwhai clusters; a time for the peeling of wet pie bags and flattened coffee cups from the corners of the garden, the removal of splintered planks, old glazing and soggy strips of batting from the patio, and no living thing more relieved than the cherry tree, whose limbs were sawn short to make space for the rigging.

Spring! The perfect season for a yellow front door. It’s oil-based paint and will need three coats, so looks patchy at the moment and frankly, ill-advised. It will have a lacquered finish, the door, like the glossy shell of a sports car. Yolky. Not the soft, powdery yellow I had in mind, but if anywhere needs a daub of colour, colour for colour’s sake, it’s Wellington - a city being forced to swallow the country’s medicine, hollowed out by public service job cuts and the scapegoating of the lanyard class. A city of failing restaurants and cafes in trouble (“It’s the worst it’s been in thirty years”), marginal shops in lonely malls, burst water mains, road cones, cold fronts, black mould and unease.

With a yellow front door, we can deflect the doom and bounce back something like hope, a sunburst of it, the light bending around corners and flashing through the tunnel and tumbling down the northern hills to dapple the city. We can squeeze each other’s hands and hold them up to the warmth. We can choose to trust this place, reclaim it, because look at everything it’s given us over the years: friends and neighbours, babies and children, weddings and parties, argument and agreement; radio and democracy, ribbons around degrees, statement glasses and cotton totes, door swipes and name tags, books, gossip, music, life.

Yes, with a yellow front door, we won’t know ourselves.

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I didn’t know myself on Thursday. I went to Wellington’s last remaining department store to buy undies, if you must know.

This a dire sort of business now we don’t have the genteel and discreet surrounds of the Kirkcaldie & Stains ladies’ underwear department. The city’s long-gone grande dame, sitting on Lambton Quay like a three-layered cake, was the best place to go for grutts. Everybody knew it. She, with her doorman in scarlet cuffs and a matching top hat, her tinkling live piano music on the first floor, her pointless Royal Doulton tea sets and Parker pens, and her dim little tea-room full of retirees in silk scarves, was the last word in Edwardian grace - an age where selling was an art and shopping an exercise in hope.

You could glide in there among the racks of Elle Macpherson Balconettes, grey marle Calvin Klein and frothy La Perla. A saleswoman with yes, a tape measure around her neck, would gladly assist you, making you lean forward and fall into the cups before standing you back up and tightening here, loosening there.

You would leave full of gladness, newly diagnosed as 12B, having bought one bra for everyday and one for getting lucky, nodding thanks to the pianist and stopping in Pantyhose to run your fingers over the rows of imported Italian stockings (seventy! Eighty! A hundred dollars a pair!). What glamour there was in being a woman under soft lighting, attended to by women.

Anyway, the dear old trout got sold to David Jones, and what a hash they made of it.

So now we’re forced across the road and bless, but I have to tell you, looking for knickers under harsh lighting one level below the street seriously lacks grace or glamour. There are still the staple brands - Triumph, Berlei - but the mid-to-low range ones take the most space and demand the most attention, with their tiger prints and candy colours and slightly porny, slippery fabrics. I paced between the aisles dismissing styles with synthetic gussets (yeast infection, cystitis, bacterial vaginismus). I came close to buying a five-pack of basic whites, before giving up.

Trudging wearily upstairs, I paused by a beauty counter. These were mainly deserted. In fact, a lady waiting by Clarins had to get someone from Shisedo to call Dior over, because Estée Lauder had a customer and couldn’t serve two at once. I didn’t expect to get honey-trapped by an Eastern European saleslady while this was going on, but I did.

“Come, come, we have promotion,” she said, and ushered me behind a black-lacquered counter and into a high-backed chair. She had a lovely low voice, padded with lilts and glottal stops, and a little snickering way of agreeing (“Yes, mm-hm, mm-hm”). Somehow I agreed for half of my face to be creamed with a foundation stick, which she applied with a fat brush. She herself was flawlessly made up with a scarlet lip and bold eyebrows. Either she, or her product, smelled like a string quartet and chandeliers.

“I don’t usually wear foundation,” I squeaked. She agreed, demonstrating mild interest but no investment in my opinion, as she was also doing other things (mollifying a waiting customer, showing a colleague which cabinet held the lipsticks). The brush patted my cheek like a kitten’s paw. “Very hydrating,” she murmured, with the -ing sounding like -ink. “I add blusher.” My insides went all soft.

There’s nothing lovelier than being paid such close attention while at the same time being ignored. This happens in the best of salons. In that moment you’re worth beautifying, your features closely observed by someone better groomed (and there I was in a shapeless windbreaker, faded jeans and sneakers), someone up so unusually close to you that their perfume is imprinting itself on your skin. They are determined to bring out the best in you. Whatever your name is.

But at the same time what they are doing to you is so routine they’re capable of holding down other conversations, completing other transactions, simultaneous to yours. This takes the pressure off you. You can just submit, mute in your chair, nameless but not faceless, and receive whatever comes. These five minutes are not under your control but steered instead by someone with a stronger opinion about the way your face should look. I mean, you only came here in for pants.

“You look,” she said, and gestured towards one of those mirrors with a built-in light. I looked, and my hand flew up to my cheek. I mean, it was amazing. I was all dew. I was a rose. A cut peach.

MY FACE LOOKS LIKE A BABY’S BOTTOM, I typed excitedly to Usha, as I left the shop and trotted back to the car. Why weren’t more people gaping at me? I LOOK LIKE A MOVIE STAR.

I couldn’t believe what a difference good slap could make. Obviously, not the slap I usually use: a cheap tinted moisturizer from the chemist, when I ever bothered to use it. The thin kind that lets freckles show through. This stuff - the tiny stick, for which I had forked out all my knicker money - hid everything, implying I take baths in vats of cream and eat fish roe with a spoon.

Usha, meanwhile, was doing the maths. $100 FOR 10 GRAMS? COCAINE IS CHEAPER, she replied. Yes! It had been daylight robbery! But it was worth it, and thrilling to be knickerless, if I could go around looking like THIS.

By the time I got home, I had to admit the cream had granulated around my nose and flakes of it had gathered above my eyebrows, where I’m always dry. The bridge of my glasses was smudgy. I hadn’t KNOWN MYSELF, but this disappointment felt familiar.

My own secretions had ruined my brief few hours of perfection. I was back to being mortal, plain. But the intoxicating scent of the make-up lady had mingled somehow with my hair and skin, my oil and sweat, and I carried it everywhere all afternoon, as evidence.

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Thirty years ago this week, a documentary about three Blackpool hair salons aired on BBC2 in Britain. Each salon is helmed by tightly-permed women in polyester tunics, their front doors opening onto down-at-heel terraced streets. Their clients are pensioners, lonely in varying degrees; all are coming in for more than a shampoo and set, a mug of tea and a mint. They are there for company, routine, local news, and the modest rituals of femininity. They are there for a small measure of fuss before going home to an empty house, or to change their invalid husband’s colostomy bag.

Nothing exactly happens - the ladies arrive and remove their coats, their hair is washed and curlers popped in, their heads are wrapped in pink or blue nets; occasionally, a fishmonger might call in to offer the women haddock or prawns from his van. He is deferential, out of his depth. There is tinkling music and lingering shots of stout ankles in low heels. But somehow, Three Salons at the Seaside is 40 minutes of the most charming, affecting TV you’ll ever see.

I’m not even sure the hairdressers are any good (Hilary, Tricia, Mary) - they tend to brush out curls with a vigour that widens the old ladies’ eyes. In one extended scene, a woman is doused in so much hairspray I expected her to asphyxiate. This was 1994 - an ozone hole was busily frying New Zealand around that time, and now I’m thinking The Vanity Box was to blame.

They couldn’t be funnier, these women, and they don’t even know it.

“Ee, worrin’t it a sad way which her mum died?” remarks Hilary, teasing out someone’s hair. “We were horrified that day, I don’t know if you remember. She died on our toilet.” Hilary says this in the same register as she says everything else and her client is unperturbed. “Yes, I went upstairs and found her.” Everyone twitters with mild concern, then titters at the remark that at least she died with her hair done. Anyway, Hilary finishes, “Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again in our establishment,” and blasts her client with hairspray.

Later we find out Hilary is tough as old leather boots. One lady under a dryer tells another lady she was knocked over by a car outside Kwik-Save. “I had to ‘ave stitches in me head. I’ve had to walk wi’ a stick, since.” Four stitches, she had. Two were removed at the doctor’s and she was supposed to go back. Instead, she came to The Vanity Box. “I came to Hilary and Hilary said, ‘I’ll take those stitches out’. So Hilary took them out.” She says this with satisfaction.

This way of life seems distant now, the wartime generation lost for good. I mourn these clucky, cooing doves - these ladies with spun-sugar white hair and oversized, magnifying glasses, like my own Geordie nan, Gladys. Those who spent their working lives in factories, then lived out retirement within the span of six or seven dirty-brick streets, referring to their kids as “our Terence, our Eileen”, keeping a close eye on births, deaths and marriages, ruing against change, and ever-ready for hardship. They didn’t always live long lives; they often died in their beds.

These women of Tricia’s and Mary’s were angels, really, in smocks, offering softness and sweetness in a world of coin-fed gas and electricity, dole queues and slow decline. You can’t take everything away from people, all at once. You have to give them dignity, and a chance to catch their breath.

Ding-a-ling, goes the door. Come inside, Mrs Freckle, and get yourself warm.

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The image of a wet crocus is by NoName_13 on Pixabay.

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Two other mentions: the astringently funny

Ana Samways

of Sideswiped fame is going behind a paywall. She is reliably punchy and fizzy as a popped cork. Take the plunge and support her writing. You won’t regret it.

I’m making lovely connections thanks to this blog and even had a hug from the mighty totara

Alan Doak

, who saw me from the wheel of his bus and opened the doors to say hi (he was parked at the time. He’s not a lunatic). He’s finished with his driving and is off to walk the Camino soon - very likely to blog about it. I suggest you subscribe if you haven’t already. He writes like a dream and draws like the artist he is. It will be uplifting reading.