mostly david ephgrave

The grey hairs appearing at my temples think they’ve gone unnoticed, but they haven’t. At first, there was just one, of inconclusive greyness; the difference could have been due to hair product. Looking back though, I was burying my rapidly frosting head in the sand: why would my daily two-pronged matt clay and hairspray attack result in a white hair in exactly the same place? While I wasn’t bothered by this potential change, I couldn’t help but keep an eye on it, particularly post-haircut. That was the ultimate litmus test, with results showing up grey instead of purple (though the latter would explain Phyllis from Coronation Street). A few visits to the barber later and the results are in; someone’s follicles have reduced their melanin output and that someone is me . I’m not that concerned, to be honest; plenty of people grey far earlier than me. That said, it raises the inevitable question: how long before I switch from Grease-era John T...

If television programmes are to be believed, the Seventies were brown . As I was born in 1981, I'm unable to comment on this theory first-hand. Whilst being a couple of years shy of the opportunity to offer an eyewitness account, I’ve certainly seen a lot of secondary evidence.   A nything that wasn’t brown was a brownish-grey or orange. Take Columbo, for instance. I’m a big fan of the dishevelled detective, owning the complete series as a DVD box-set. There are two things I’ve learnt since watching so many episodes back-to-back: that instances of homicide in 1970s' Los Angeles were alarmingly high – and that most were committed to a sepia backdrop. It’s as if they’d decided to work to a very specific colour-scheme: nothing darker than Peter Falk’s cigar; nothing lighter than his raincoat.   If only the perpetrators had stuck to this formula with more rigidity, they could have got away with murder. A young David ...