In the beginning there was De Bob...

So this blogging malarky is my newest crazy whim - I'm interested to see if it'll last longer than the previous notions of daily workouts, world travels or my band having a no.1 hit (reminder to self - learn to play guitar, or at least get more tattoos), all of which fall into my extensive lists of "ongoing projects". Has to be better than whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing right?

I thought I'd start with a little history lesson, which is, like all history lessons, intended as a cautionary tale, lest we forget. Back in a time I like to call "The Unpleasantness", aka the 80's, my home was a cold, smoggy corporation (council was slightly posher) estate, strangely Dickensian in spite of being composed of 95% thin plywood, 5% "itchy candyfloss" in the attic. Yes, nostalgia hasn't softened my memories of those days, awesome as Fat Frog icepops were. Being the endlessly practical Irish mother she is, my mother managed to churn out 4 kids in 6 years, and, so as not to give us "ideas above our station", dressed us all pretty uniformly in whatever hideous garb was at hand - wooly bobbly jumpers (regardless of weather), duffel coats, dungarees (the woman was obsessed with dungarees), elasticated waistband jeans, and shiny hot pink shell suits. All except my brother, the youngest, who was generally to be found looking like an extra from The Lil' Rascals - side-parted hair, vest, shirt, shorts (shorts!), needlessly held up with BRACES. Where my mother was able to source red Tom & Jerry braces remains to this day an eternal mystery to me, like the universe, or people who like The Corrs.

Lil bro' lookin all '30s. Which is all very well...

...Except when your contemporaries look like this

Ok, I MAY have exaggerated the bowtie, but I vividly remember the rest as being wholey accurate, down to the highly polished shoes. I also remember Lil Bro's stoic lack of resistance to his wardrobe - not that he had much say in the matter, but he never complained about being sent to school every morning looking like Alfalfa. It's a wonder the child survived playschool. Us girls were a different matter however. I reckon my mother was the sort who'd dreamed of having perfectly turned-out little girls, who liked skipping and unicorns and hated getting their dresses dirty.

Instead she got us - me, whose only career aspiration ever was to be a stunt woman, thus I could rarely be put in dresses for fear of showcasing my extensive scrapes and bruises to the world; Sister 1 who liked to eat flowers and play with reluctant animals who'd "followed" her home, and Sister 2, who was constantly and inexplicably covered in mud. (At least, we assumed it was mud). What was a mother to do with such misfits, so as to make them fit for decent society? Well, I'll tell you what my mother did - three identical BOWL HAIRCUTS. Every couple of months we'd be trooped off to sit on a bunch of phonebooks and get a sore neck while a hairdresser (a TRAINED PROFESSIONAL hairdresser) surely broke some hairdressing oath if not a couple of human rights violations by giving us the most hideous haircuts known to humankind...

That's right - I was THAT kid. Thinking back now, I think my mother thought that if we all looked the same, the weirdness of one child could be absorbed or at least overlooked by the collective cuteness of the trio. That might just have worked, except for the fact we were ALL little oddballs. Perhaps we were art, a crazy post-modern concept I wasn't then intelligent enough to grasp (and doubt I ever will be). I vaguely remember a time when looking like The Beatles didn't bother me, when our names were used interchangeably (even by our own parents) and constant queries as to whether we were triplets were patiently explained away; that, no, we're not triplets, mother waited the minimum-required 9 months between each of our births. But then, one day, it DID bother me. Majorly. The main turning point for me was Lil Bro realising that we resembled Lego people with the clip-on hair.

Back then, Lil Bro liked to name things, sometimes using words of his own invention. For some reason all his Lego men, women and children were called Bob thus, somehow, the offending hairdo came to be known as DeBob. This later evolved into a mortal insult we'd hurl at each other in moments of fury, such was the negative connotations it carried; coupled with the fear that our mother would catch us "swearing", it proved quite useful.

So I did the only thing any self-respecting 8-year-old could do, and found a better use for my Crayola bunny scissors. Tough work it was, but I was never brought to the hairdresser again, and I was free, free, FREE! No one ever confused me with my sisters again, life was good, Fat Frogs tasted better, I WON. It was, and still is, my greatest triumph.

Twenty years on, oh how we have evolved! If this were back in the days of spandex, where every Irish person looked like an extra from The Snapper, I'd probably be telling this tale in a smoky pub or around an open fire... (then again, perhaps not, since I reckon the internet age has raised our collective threshold for boredom - I doubt this tale would survive a non-internet setting. You suckers!). But then, last week, I visited a hairdresser on a whim, parted with 80 euro, and left looking like this...

Ah humanity, will we ever learn?

Next time - My hollow friendship with Terry the monkey