I shaved my legs this week for the first time since around the beginning of June. That’s right. You heard me. JUNE. It’s been too cold to bother with them. I’ve been wearing winter clothes so no-one could see the increasing hairiness and be shocked into speechlessness. I was not frightening any horses. That was until I happened to be visiting my parents and the topic strayed to the fact my sister had just bought a new lady shaver kind of thing that she thought was fabulous. “Oh” I said nonchalantly, pulling up the leg of my jeans, “I should probably shave my legs sometime soon”. My parents both gasped in horror at my lack of ladylikeness. As the young, cool people say, they were full of disappoint in me.

Later that week my Mum rang to see if I wanted to come up and eat dinner with them. I was teaching late so I declined but she tried to entice me with the promise of a present. “What is it”, I demanded, wondering if it was worth my while after all. “A lady shaver”. Hmmmmm. I decided to go up and see them the next evening.

We ate dinner and then like an excited child my Dad raced off to get the new shaving device. “I’ll put it together for you”. (This entailed getting it out of the ridiculous packaging and putting in the two triple A batteries). I pushed my plate away and decided to try out my gift. Note: (and this will be very important in a moment) I had not finished up my salad. There was a slice of cucumber and some lettuce still on my plate. Once again I pushed up the leg of my jeans and attacked a path of my yeti-like leg. It was only a minute until I needed to clean out the hair. So I got the little brush that came with the shaver and scraped the hair out. What to do with this. I didn’t want to put it on my mother’s clean floor, so I deposited it on my plate on top of a slice of cucumber. I returned to my leg when suddenly all was disturbance and mayhem and my father was hacking and spitting into his hand. Oh yes, gentle readers, as is his habit of polishing off everyone’s leftover food, he had decided to help himself to my slice of cucumber which was now garnished with some leg hair shavings.

Laugh? My mother and sister and I were nearly sick with laughter.

Now I realise nobody emerges from this tale looking particularly classy or genteel. Shaving legs at the table? Eating cucumber covered in leg hair shavings? Finding that uproariously amusing? It’s not exactly champagne comedy. But these are the things that life is made of. The incident has been added to the time my father got really cranky because the TV remote wasn’t working until someone pointed out to him that he was using his mobile phone as well as the time he was watching (*sleeping*) Billy Elliot and half an hour from the end asked “Does this boy dance?”. The list goes on but he asked me not to tell anyone about the cucumber/leg hair surprise. So I have just written a post about it instead.