Last night we decided to stroll down to town for dinner. While the net strolling was downhill, a lot of it was very steeply upwards, to the top of the hill where the cable car (funicular, to be more accurate, I think) ends. Then there was a way downwards between tall hedges. At the foot of the hill were young people, women in white dresses with flowers in their hair and men in togas with laurel wreaths. We went to WBC, which turned out to be excellent, particularly their raw bar – the oyster was very tasty, fresh and minerally and the clams were all extremely distinct and flavourful. Though I did recoil a bit when I squeezed lemon over one and it curled up, still alive. With oysters it’s easy to pretend it’s not a living creature. But telling myself that killing and eating is no better than eating without killing, as one does it in a reasonably humane way, I closed my eyes and chomped down as quickly as I could. Sadly it was also the least tasty of the clams and I don’t think this was because of the wriggling.
We finished Killing Eve on returning to the house. All in all, I didn’t think much of it. The first two episodes were much, much better than what followed, and in retrospect I would have preferred it to be a sort of lighthearted Adventures of Villanelle show rather than an attempt at exploring obsessive relationships. It didn’t have the time to do this justice, and was rather silly anyway. Plus the plot-driven contortions in the story line didn’t really convince one that this was a serious show. I was also surprised that Sandra Oh got as much acclaim as she did. I didn’t think her acting was particularly good.
This morning I went for a haircut. I had previously identified a Japanese hairdresser, but the Doyenne, on hearing I needed a haircut, immediately made an appointment with her own hairdresser and dropped me off this morning. This was a tiny salon on the third floor of a CBD building on quite a cool little street. The Doyenne came in and chatted with the hairdresser for a bit before handing me over. I wanted my usual cut, very short in the back, longer and asymmetrically cut in the front, but the hairdresser had different ideas. She went along with the short back but the front, she thought, she really wanted to use the curls. This surprised me as while my hair is wavy when it’s long, it is by no means curly. But she clearly saw it as curly and was full of praise for it, and applied curl holding mousse and chatted about curly hair behaviour under various circumstances, and I was so bemused I just nodded along. The result was not too bad, though of course once I’ve washed the mousse and blowdry out I’ll get a better sense of it. It’s definitely not my usual austere style, but should be fine.
In the next chair was an old customer whom I couldn’t see without my glasses. It turned out to be an air traffic controller with a blonde mohawk which he was having dyed blue to match the pineapple print suit he was planning to wear to a wedding. Not the sort of fellow customer I would have expected for the Doyenne.
There is a fierce wind in Wellington today. It is a notoriously windy city but it had been still since our arrival. Everyone is complaining about the wind, and even the Doyenne allowed that it can get windy so that you have to hold onto lamp posts to avoid being blown away, which seems very windy to me.