Accidentally fashionable

I think everyone is now aware of the Philadelphia chocolate cheese product.  I’ve not heard of one person that’s tried it and didn’t like it.  Roughly 23 years ago, I remember being ridiculed for mixing Philadelphia cream cheese with chocolate spread for a Friday treat in my packed lunch for school.  So was I really a strange child?  Or was I some kind of visionary for small trends?

It’s something that’s bothered me for a couple of decades.  Not the chocolate cheese thing.  No, I mean things I do largely to buck the trends that five minutes later are all the rage.

I cut my hair boyishly short in my youth.  Granted, it didn’t look great on me, but I swam a lot and not only was it more convenient, it also flew in the face of the shoulder length perm that engulfed most girls of my age.  No sooner did I cut all my hair off (naturally blonde, down to my waist at the time) than it was all over the magazines that the thing to do was cut your hair short.  I was most chagrined.

These days my hair is back to being long and I’ll never cut it all off again.  Looking like my dad in drag does not appeal when I look back at the photos.  Still naturally blonde, although admittedly a couple of shades darker and smattered with greys (and the odd alarmingly white tungsten element appearing here and there).  I dye it bright red though, so you’d never know I’ve had greys since I was fourteen.  Well, you do now, but that doesn’t really bother me – you can’t see them and that’s what matters.

What happens when I’ve been Red for a short while?  The makers of my colour (who I’m not going to advertise because it’s MY colour dammit!) start advertising and suddenly it’s quite a popular thing to go red.  How peeved am I?  When I did it, it was unusual to see anyone else walking round with the same colour.  Last time I walked through the high street, there were half a dozen bright reds.  Ladies, a quick tip, it’s not a shade you can carry off with a spray tan – go back to the bleach bottle.  Leave the reds to those of us pale enough to be from the Village of the Damned if we tried to do your usual platinum thing.  I’m not changing my colour.  Soon enough it will be so last year and then so not the thing to do and I’ll be comfortable again.

For someone who’s spent her life on the fringe, ‘following the crowd’ was never important.  It even became the opposite of what I wanted, but every so often it seems I hit upon the next big thing before it happens, and only just before, so I get long to be me before it isn’t different anymore.  If people were copying me, I’d be really worried, but since I know no-one in their right mind would, I think it’s safe to assume I just sometimes accidentally pre-empt a trend or a product and not always by a short time. 

I was making teriyaki long before Yo Sushi was even a brainchild (although I’d given up calorific chocolate-cheese and btw, TGI use a cooked down teriyaki version made with JD for their ‘world famous’ glaze).  I was saying meh long before it became common vernacular.  I was buying my groceries online twelve years ago and laughing at the trolley-ragers.  So many things.  And you know what?  People laughed at me for each and every one.  So enjoy your chocolate-cheese – I grew out of it years ago!