Exfoliation! Yes, it’s necessary, but where’s it all go to?
Well, back to the eternal question of the nature of time and I can say that six weeks has simply flown by thanks to my having a project to focus on. I have been religiously putting in a lot of work on my base tan for the coming summer and I am so ahead of the game when it comes to going brown.
Of course there have been the odd half days off for walks and swimming , “All work and no play, etc”, but a large part of the time has been employed exposing my epidermis to searing sun, biting winds, bone numbing cold sea and, of course, salt, as most of the beach showers don’t work early in the season.
This has helped enormously with exfoliation. You see, apparently, the reason old people are so grey is that the outer layer of skin is not renewing itself efficiently. It is in effect dead. Old people are, in practice, dying from the outside, inwards.
So, I have been exfoliating like a blizzard of cherry blossom in a hurricane, like a python who does want to go to the ball, like a snowstorm of my former self.
And it’s yer DNA innit! All over the shop like yer own monogrammed confetti at a shotgun wedding gone Pete Tong! A bloke can’t get away wiv anyfing these days! No mate……I mean……THESE DAYS!!!!
Anyway. Where does it all go?
This is more a metaphysical question than one of domestic hygiene and waste management. Sure, we know that, despite using up a couple of spare whales in the form of lotions and unguents, it goes into beds, sofas and on the floor, and down the drain. In the Rupert Brooke sense, ‘there is a corner of a foreign field that is forever….blah, blah’.
But this cellular detritus was once the outer facing form of the essential me. It was what defined the shape and physical entity of this ten and three quarter stone sack of flesh and bone to the world.
I will miss it.
But as I look at my lizard like arms and my scaly legs I wonder if some higher scheme of reverse evolution is in play here? If so what better end to things than if, in a few years, having become more scaly, less upright, a bit more smelly, maybe, I wriggle my fishy ass down the beach and into the briny sea, disappearing with barely a ripple.
The right wing would laud me. “That Rob Davies” they would say, “At least the cunt went back to where he came from.”