I’m walking through our local town on Saturday morning, having dropped Annie off at football training.
There’s a festival going on in the centre of town.
There are endless festivals in this place. Literary festivals, food festivals, river festivals, you name it. Festivals are obviously a big money-spinner for the town. Me and the kids joke that one day there’ll probably be a ‘Festival of Festivals’.
Today, apparently, it’s a vintage car festival. Except hardly any of the cars on show are actually vintage. Most of them are vast, expensive and completely new. Sleek, shiny beasts on four wheels. So this isn’t a vintage car festival. In fact, it’s a Festival of the Area’s Most Expensive Cars.
Standing next to the Area’s Most Expensive Cars are the vehicles’ proud owners… exclusively late-middle-aged men in pastel caps. They bask in the reflected glory of their gleaming, exorbitantly-priced transportation.
At the end of the row of the Area’s Most Expensive Cars is a single Golf GTI – it looks like it’s from the 1980s. The owner of this one obviously didn’t get the memo that this is a Festival for the Area’s Most Expensive Cars. He obviously thought it was a Festival for the Area’s Crappest 1980s cars. The box-like GTI looks like the kind of thing my parents used to drive, when I was growing up in Surrey. I think we had a yellow Datsun which was very similar.
If it’s possible for a car to look sheepish, as it sits completely out of place in a row of modern metallic monsters, the tiny GTI manages it.
When I get home with Annie, I make myself a tea in the kitchen whilst Lizzie prepares some macaroni cheese by the oven.
It’s then that I notice something.
‘Your hair,’ I say to Lizzie, ‘it’s looking… tufty.’
Lizzie’s hair, now well over an inch long, is indeed beginning to stick out at strange angles. Like she’s been caught in a hurricane and an earthquake simultaneously.
‘Apparently,’ says Lizzie, ‘after chemo, quite often your hair grows back curly.’
Weird! I think. Curly hair has always been a me (and my relatives) thing, not a Lizzie (and her relatives) thing. My Mum has it, I had it (before my hair all fell out) and now Annie has it. Is Lizzie going to become an honorary member of the Clifton gene pool by getting curly hair too?
‘You’ve been struck by the Curse of the Cliftons!’ I declaim, melodramatically.
‘You’re ONE OF US NOW!’ I finish.
Lizzie shrugs, completely uninterested in her potentially curly hair (I guess she’s had bigger things on her mind than what’s immediately above it) and continues making the macaroni cheese.
P. D. Clifton 
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