Any by 'war', I mean 'humidity'. Do you remember a little while ago, I didn't make much of it you probably missed it. I had a few little things called dreadlocks. I loved these dreadlocks, I thought they were awesome. I preened them daily, I plied them with lotions and potions the world over to make them look good and smell nice, I treated them with the respect and dignity I thought they deserved.
Then I got to Thailand.
Humidity is a strange thing. Worse still when it's already boiling hot and all you want to be is cool and dry, just like my dreads. Humidity is like being wrapped in a thick wet quilt, inside a sauna. . . . with hot wet feathers inside you lungs. Sometimes the humidity is lovely, at night when I'm sat on the veranda in nothing more than shorts and it's warm, I mean really nice and warm, but it's night, I love that. The other side of the coin though, is when I'm training. Because when you feel like you're inside a sauna, wrapped in a quilt, coughing up chicken insulation, you kind of want it to be drizzling a little bit. . . and cool. . oh what I would give for a nice cool drizzle!
While I may have a love hate relationship with humidity, my dreads only saw it one way. The wrong way. From the moment I stopped off the plane, my nice tight dreads started to transform. They started to resemble the tails of small squirrels sticking out of my head. No amount of rolling could reduce the fuzz, infact I think it might even have made it worse. Dreadlocks like to be dry, when they get wet they start to unravel themselves because of the reduced friction. They also smell if they stay wet for too long, not nice. So there I was, day after day, rolling away and applying my ointments, and what happened? They just started to look greasy, wet greasy squirrels tails that will end up smelling. I tried to dry them, but seeing as I'm sweating more than the builder who sold Barrymore "slip-safe" tiling for around his pool, it's not really working.
Eventually, something had to give.
It is at this moment that I would like to thank Dave. Dave tirelessly spend hour after hour after hour working on my hair to get it looking sweet. He would do any touch-ups that needed doing and he would get the awkward ones at the back that I couldn't reach. Without him, I would have never had dreads in the first place.
So one day, after morning training, I decided enough was enough, these things have got to go. I dutifully armed myself with shampoo, a steel comb, and time.
Needless to say, getting them out was a lesson in patience and pain. So much so that I haven't been able to get them out completely. Some of them are too stubborn to budge. This means I'm now left with a big mop of hair that is reminiscent of a badly kept seven year old boys. A big mess full of knots.
At some point, I need to find a barbers on this island and get the whole lot cut off.
Please note here people that I made a decision, I chose substance over style. . . this county is doing strange things to my head!