‘Only you could go to hairdressers and come back looking older.’

So was my daughters’ opinions of my hair appointment. Thanks guys 😊🥴.

It’s true though. The last time I had my hair done was in St. Lucia. It was just the right amount of highlighting to still be brown-haired but without such jarring grey at the temples. Still, we were new to the Caribbean then.

My hair has gone lighter since. It’s been bleached by the sun and has gone greyer too. I’d blame living on Quest – but Jack’s hair is still nut-brown. And we both started off with the same hair colour! Nothing like marrying someone with the exact same hair colour that stays the same colour. I assumed another hair appointment would put mine to where it was before. Duh.

I came back from a nice salon next to the drugstore – known here as the drogist, more blond then brown. More silver than grey. Very silver in fact.

I realised how light it was when Miranda from Holland was blow-drying it. She’d done a really careful job. Each layer of hair was picked through with a kind of serrated skewer. She’d brushed it with the highlighting bleach, wrapped up in foils and brought over a heated and rotating halo.

I’ve never really been blond before. Except maybe as a toddler. Suddenly my hair is a lighter colour then my skin. And funnily, this doesn’t cover my grey up so much as age me overall.

Miranda noticed too. ‘You don’t like it?’ she asked hesitantly.

I stared at myself in the salon mirror. The classic, ‘not much we can do now’ feeling passed through me. Hair-wise I mean, we could re-dye it. But frankly, I’m not spending another hundred bucks. Grey, brown, silver. Who cares? Just next time, I’m going brown. I like brown.

I like purple too. And green. These were the colours last night on our night dive. Jack and I dived the reef just outside the marina. The dive site is called Something Special. This is the beat-up reef area of Bonaire. Discarded tyres lay around in the shallows. The marina wall butts up against the reef. It’s also the place where people see a ton of interesting marine life.

Our marina neighbours Britney and Clint, came out of quarantine and went there for their first sea swim. They dropped in on three eagle rays, gliding around. Something Special indeed.

We went down with two torches; a normal white-light torch and a purple, UV torch. The UV torch gave us a psychedelic paradise. Greens and purples shone out from different corals. The reef was a completely different-looking place. To think that some creatures see the reef like this all the time – and corals respond by colouring themselves differently. They definitely don’t need the hairdresser’s. Lucky corals.