The Witty gritty
Rachel Johnson on the pesky gift that keeps on giving Iwent to see a friend the other day. At the door, she clutched at her Pre-Raphaelite, wheaten locks and cried, ‘Don’t come any closer, we’ve all had nits for months!’ I embraced her anyway, and our blonde hair mingled. But she really shouldn’t have worried her pretty nitty head about it.
Lice are everywhere. Nits R Us: they’re the present that just keeps giving this Christmas. The old stigma that used to attach not just to lice but to admitting in print that you have them is, officially, a thing of the past.
Mary Killen, the Spectator’s ingenious agony aunt, attributes her ‘cleansing’ from one national newspaper to the fact that she wrote about her nits. Dear Mary revealed that the colourist at the smart salon Jo Hansford had refused to do her highlights ‘till we’ve dealt with your infestation’, while gingerly prodding her scalp with rubbergloved fingers.
And I once mentioned in a column a new coloured nit shampoo, one that purported to highlight nit eggs in lurid purple. This piece of Polly Filler so delighted Veronica Wadley, the Evening Standard’s editor, that she dropped me a sweet note requesting that I never mention ‘that old chestnut’ again.
Yes, in the old days, a female hack writing about her own family’s headlice was about as wise as a newly married couple giving Hello! an intimate guided tour of their Bel Air mansion. It was a guaranteed, copper-bottomed, card-carrying curse. But that’s so over! Now, ‘super’ or ‘perma-nits’ are everywhere, ineradicable. All English children have them. And so do their mothers (except this one, I add, not that I wouldn’t admit to them if I actually did). Nits are no longer a secret shame. Nit combs now emerge from Lulu Guinness/Anya Hindmarch handbags along with BlackBerry Pearls, and litter the surfaces of west London wetrooms. Headlice products sit on the counter unapologetically at Fresh & Wild, and the smartest Mayfair hair salons have their own, special nit lotions on sale alongside the fudge and serum. Frankly, the way things are going, it’s only a matter of time before godparents decide to give Baby an engraved silver Theo Fennell nit comb, rather than a boring old Christening cup. It would get a lot more use, too.
‘In the summer, I left my Nitty Gritty combs by the sink in the Oriental in Bangkok and the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai without a second thought,’ one Notting Hill mother told me. ‘The problem is not leaving them around, but losing them and trying to get new ones! The Thais don’t have nits, which I found out when I went to the chemist, and mimed scratching and sprinkling on my scalp,’ she continued.
‘They fell about laughing. I ended up buying a sort of mediaeval rake from an ironmongers.’ But while all English mothers and children have them, or have had them, I’ve never known a man to catch nits, which I put down to testosterone. So men find their children’s repeated infestations and their wives’ continuous attempts to delouse their offspring tiresome. ‘Oh do leave the poor child alone,’ my husband groans, as he sees me bearing down yet again on one of our three children with an electric comb whining menacingly.
Yes, it is tiresome. And pointless. Well spotted, gentlemen! Getting rid of them is a full-time job, and there’s only one return on your investment of labour. As soon as your nit-free child returns to school, he will be re-infested within days. Having said that, one glamorous film director and mother has given up on traditional methods (i.e., chemical shampoos, conditioning and combing) in favour of an even more radical solution.
‘Well, you have to drive to this woman’s house in Hendon,’ she begins, unpromisingly. ‘And she anoints your hair, every strand, with yellow ointment she makes herself to a secret recipe. This takes 45 minutes. It hardens into a helmet. Then you have to leave it for 12 hours. In the morning, simply remove the yellow helmet, and shower,’ she says (I like the use of the word ‘simply’ there).
Obviously, this treatment works best on nights when you’re not going to a smart cocktail party or film premiere, but you heard it here first.
Soon, I predict, the smarter kind of wife will be openly swapping the numbers of fashionable ‘delousing professionals’ at pilates and coffee mornings. Just you wait.
Rachel Johnson’s Notting Hell (Fig Tree Penguin, £12.99) is out now.
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