All is vanity

I am fifty two years old and have a lot of, well, not gray, but more like white hair. I went out with a couple of friends the other day, both of them a bit older than me. Their hair is not gray, their hair was dark for one or a sort of ginger for the other. I suddenly realised that these sixty year old dudes coloured their hair! Not even a wisp of gray was to be seen on the men and especially not on the women.

I suppose that I had not seriously thought of colouring my hair in the same way that I wouldn't wear a backwards baseball cap or allow the waistline of my jeans to show a large expanse of arse, well, not intentionally anyway. Besides, my underpants, not that you're interested are not classy or make the right, if any, sort of statement.

My vanity is sort of opposite. My Grandfather, William Anderson was born in 1906 and became a granddad because of me when he was fifty four years old. At that time his hair was gray and later turned a snowy white. White enough to make a polar bear jealous in fact. My granddad was a man who was constantly interested in something, even up to just before his untimely death at the age of one hundred and two years. Granddad gave me my sense of curiosity and a desire not to waste my time. Granddad gave me Charles Dickens, Robert Lois Stevenson, Jules Verne, George Orwell. Granddad  showed me what trigonometry was for when I had berated a math teacher for being a boring twit. Granddad showed me how to ride a bicycle when my dad was working and my mother didn't care. Granddad told me that all the important things in my life would happen by complete accident which I remembered when a girl I really really fancied fell over, I helped her up and she held my hand all the way home.

I could never dye my hair or cover up the shocking gray and soon to be white that I will inevitably carry until the day I die because to do so would be to insult the genetic code of one of the greatest men on earth. My white hair is a badge of honour for me. Thanks Granddad!