Avoiding The Fringes

If you know where The Fringes are and who lives there, you're probably a John Wyndham fan. I became one in early adolescence, when my father handed me a battered Penguin copy of The Chrysalids from his own bookshelf. I swallowed it whole, and read it several times more in the next few years, along with The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos and The Kraken Wakes.
It's a marvellous book, guarranteed to appeal to adolescents going through that "why am I so different to everyone else?/I must be adopted" stage.
You can find a detailed plot summary here. All you need to know for present purposes is that The Chrysalids is set in post-apocalyptic Labrador. Here, a small group of survivors adhere to a harsh fundamentalist doctrine that sees transgressors exiled to - yes - The Fringes. And it all it takes to be cast out is to be revealed as deviant from a tightly defined genetic normality.
Ten-year-old David is the son of a pious and powerful patriarch. He therefore keeps quiet about his strange recurring dreams of a beautiful lighted city and horseless carriages. However, he and a few other young people discover they are carrying their own blasphemous deviation - the ability to read each other's minds. Soon, they are forced to flee to The Fringes themselves.
Eventually the group is rescued - by a woman who contacts them telepathically from a far-off place called Sealand. When they reach it, David recognises the place of his dreams.
My father told me this place was New Zealand. As we were still living in England and I knew nothing of parental plans to emigrate, this was of little interest to me.
What made it of complusive interest was that I was a deviant myself. The medical diagnosis is that my right ear lacks the usual cartilege folds, which means it's shapeless and prominent, like the one on the left.

And what got me thinking ears was my recent blog on resumed ponytail wearing. I said that:

one of things I hated back then, apart from lack of ponytail perkiness, which was closely correlated with popularity, was that girls sat behind me in class playing with it and boys whizzed by in the corridors and playground and pulled it

I quite forgot the thing that I hated more, the thing that lay behind my dislike of any attention paid to my hair: how heartlessly a ponytail revealed my deformity.
I wasn't teased or bullied about my ear, but, from the day I changed from plaits, which hid the ear, to my ponytail, I was subject to helpful observations along the lines of "Your ear sticks out", and innocent inquiries, like "Why does your ear stick out?"
My mother had asked herself the same thing. Apparently I spent the first few weeks of life with the offending ear sticking-plastered to my head. Until some medico pointed out that this was never going to fix it, that it would take an operation to do so. Someone - perhaps the same health provider - told my mother there was no point doing this before I was 14, since it might just revert. But when I got to 14 and 15 and 16, my ear was the last thing anyone was thinking about. Instead, we emigrated en famille to New Zealand.
Only on bad days does it seem like The Fringes; mostly, it lives up to the promise of Sealand.

A ponytail comes of age

I haven't yet tangoed through a summer, so it's a very recent discovery that, even in a climate as untropical as Wellington's, if you have 50 people dancing in close embrace on a small floor, the temperature fast goes through the roof. Mine, anyway. Right now this feels like as big a challenge as was learning to dance backwards in high heels at the beginning of the year.
As a general rule, I don't sweat. I wish I did - it might slow down the overheating process. But get me clamped (however nicely) in someone's arms, with the right side of my face against their head, and we're almost instantaneously glued together.
Men, by and large, do sweat. Plus, as leaders, they must work damn hard. So, after one tanda, I leave the floor with my hair plastered to my scalp, and my face damp, and an unbecoming scarlet.
Longish hair is therefore a problem. Last Sunday, P paused, mid-dance, and plucked some of mine from the region of his mouth. I didn't feel great about this, so last night I pulled it back into a ponytail. Which is cooler for me, too, since it isn't hanging down my back.
It's ... um, a very long time indeed since I publicly accompanied a ponytail. From babyhood, my hair was chopped to just below ear-level, parted on the left and the right captured in a ribbon. The classic 50s girl-child look.
Then, one day when I was about seven or eight and was going to the church fete, my mother announced that my hair was long enough for pigtails. With a degree of pulling and pinching, she managed to scrap it into two stubs and secure them with rubber bands (that's right - scrunchies had yet to be invented). She called my father to admire them, as I stared awestruck into the mirror above the fireplace.

From then on we were growing my hair. (If you knew my mother, you would understand that she was commander-in-chief of this project while I was a mere foot solider.) I progressed through plaits, and then, after intensive lobbying, was finally - around the age of 10 or 11 - allowed to graduate to a ponytail.

Sadly, it was by then too late for one of those perky little numbers so beloved of 50s girls. My hair was too long and straight and heavy.

I would lie on my back over the edge of the bed so that head and hair hung nearly to the floor, then, as if taking my hair by surprise, could corral it all into the rubber band. I would get to my feet convinced that this time I had done it - got my ponytail to bounce on the top of my head. But within minutes it had slipped from ponytailness to horsetailness.
I came to hate it, and my thirteenth birthday present was being given permission to have it cut off. But that's another story.
One of things I hated back then, apart from lack of ponytail perkiness, which was closely correlated with popularity, was that girls sat behind me in class playing with it and boys whizzed by in the corridors and playground and pulled it. Both, from a position of rock-bottom self-esteem, I interpreted as a subtle form of disdain, if not downright mockery.
How lovely it is to grow up! Last night at the milonga two boys pulled my ponytail and not for a second did I think that meant they hated me.