accidental history

What do you think about hair dye?
Hm. When I got to Berlin I would go to this or that Frisür with the idea of having some highlights, and the hairdressers would try to persuade me to include brown highlights as looking more natural. Every time I would get dragged into a discussion of the Natural. I slightly felt that the Natural could be mine without recourse to a hairdresser, by the simple expedient of leaving the hair to its own devices. My German is not really up to discussions of the Natural and the Artificial, though, let alone the Natural as understood by early 21st century German hairdressers.

Emily Segal invited me to give an interview for Berlin Fashion Week way back in late 2009/early 2010. I was staying with my mother, but for a couple of days every so often I would go to my sister's apartment and collapse on the bed. (The theory was that I would pull together 100 pages for Bill, but there was no energy.)  In the midst of all this, anyway, I was trying to write answers to interview questions.  The feeling was of writing with a prosthetic head. I finally apologised for what struck me as a dead loss; was under the impression that ES agreed and had dropped the piece, but now I find it is online.  For better or worse, here.

(There are authors who never give interviews, and then there are authors, it seems, who never stop giving them.)