Two stories.
I’m at dinner with a dozen or so of our closest friends. All the men are middle-aged and yet all have luxurious thick heads of hair. Bastards. I’m bald. Not Polished To A Mirror Sheen, but bald. So I start what I think is a bit of self-deprecation humour, moaning on about how unfair it is that I am bald.
And everyone is quiet.
Because one of our female friends at the other end of the table is also bald, from chemo (she’s doing fine now). In my defence (and no, there is no defence) I see her so often that I’ve just got used to the fact that she doesn’t have hair, so the little social filter I have for these things didn’t kick in. But dear Og that was embarrassing.
Second story.
I’m scoring at my son’s school cricket match. (Scoring in cricket is kind of complicated, but it’s one of those Dad things you just have to do). As is the convention, the other school has a Dad who is also scoring, so that we can both keep the score books in agreement.
Turns out he went to the same high school as me, which is odd, because it is not either of the schools that our sons are going to. So we start reminiscing about old teachers, blah blah blah. Before long, we’re getting on famously.
Later on, while his son’s team are batting (and so most of their team is off the field) some young 14 year old popsy with too short a skirt and too much make-up comes up to them and behaves in a manner that is far too familiar to be proper. I figure she is a sports groupie hoping to get lucky with a trophy jock.
So I say to my new found scoring mate, “Gee, someone’s going to go to jail for that little tart.”
You can see what’s coming.
He says “What? My daughter?”
An instant hideous painful death would have been a blessing. Because we were stuck with each other’s frosty company for the next several hours (cricket is a game that takes a lo-o-o-o-ng time to play). I am wincing at the memory still.