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Claire Calman

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Claire Calman,

Claire calman

Opinion

Dipping my toes into the new normal

'I used to do my own toenails but age and arthritis happeneth to us all and it’s getting harder to reach my toes while also keeping a steady hand'

July 31, 2020 08:36
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3 min read

If you had to come up with a list of 100 adjectives to describe me, I don’t think the epithet “well-groomed” would even flit across your mind for a moment. Many of the Jewish women in our part of north London (not in the frum bit; we’re in the bit next to that: fewer sheitels and more chi-chi handbags) have manicured nails, straightened hair and designer sunglasses. In comparison, it would be fair to describe my look as “unpolished”. My hair could reasonably be labelled “free-range”: unless constrained by clips, it has an intriguing tendency to quest out sideways from my head as if in search of new realms to explore. My clothes are comfortable but not especially stylish (teenage son leans over laptop at this point to interrupt with an important announcement: “You should put: ‘not at all stylish’”. Thanks for that.) My fingernails are serviceable — clean and short but unpainted.

I’ve never been a devotee of beauty treatments. The first time I ever had a facial, it was the week before I got married and I was 38 (yes, that is quite old to get married for the first time — thank you for noticing). Before lockdown, my salon visits were limited to pedicures and sporadic eyebrow and chin threading — sporadic not because I couldn’t easily audition for Wolf-Man but because it’s really painful. At the salon I used to go to for threading, they’d have a line of seated women having parts of their faces defuzzed. I was the only one with tears streaming down my face, while everyone else just sat there impassively, as if watching a boring film.

The only treatment I like is a pedicure. I used to do my own toenails but age and arthritis happeneth to us all and it’s getting harder to reach my toes while also keeping a steady hand.

I now use a local family-run salon and when I arrive, I see they have installed a clear screen at the desk. Tick. The woman doing my pedi is wearing mask, visor, and gloves — tick, tick, tick — so I’m happy (husband Larry says I’m wasted as a writer and that I should be a government inspector as I’m unnervingly vigilant about spotting lapses in corona rules). Less impressive is the stripy tape they have put on the floor to mark their “one-way system”. That might work in a supermarket where there are aisles, but in a small salon, which narrows as it goes towards the back, they’ve had to put the tape IN arrow and the tape OUT arrow adjacent to each other, barely a few inches apart, so it looks like some strange new version of Twister, where you might be attempting to come in and go out at the same time.