We hear a lot about the wars against cancer, Alzheimer’s, ebola and more besides. But these, for me, are as yet distant battles. There is one conflict that is much closer to home and one that I, and thousands others, fight – and lose – every week.
I am talking about the deadly war of attrition against Pediculus humanus capitis. Nits. Cooties, head lice, critters.
As I speak I am scratching my head, not because I am puzzled, which is the customary reason, but because once again the little bastards have made the transition between Louise’s curly mop and my short, thinning furze.
I have been in conflict with these little six-legged monsters for the last 20 years and I am no closer to winning than ever. Once they were associated with dirt and poverty. Now we know they are just as attracted to clean, shiny hair as greasy, dirty stuff – but the stigma still remains.
No one likes to admit their child has nits. But every child seems to get them, sooner or later. So I am going to come out of the closet. They are here. In my home. On my head. And they refuse to leave.
There is one compensation. I do enjoy killing them. Going through my daughter’s barnet every Sunday night with a nit comb – to the symphony of her screams as I rake a metal comb across her scalp – extracting the little blood-puffed creatures and squashing them gives me a modicum of revenge. But what I want to know is, when we can cure tuberculosis, why we can’t do anything about these little fuckers.
For nothing seems to work. Tea tree oil, Hedrin, Lyclear, vacuuming, garlic, white wine vinegar – it’s all proved useless. I did read this week that nits can be treated by aromatherapy, but I treat this with some scepticism, mainly because aromatherapists are possibly the silliest practitioners of alternative medicine there are. What are you going to do – perfume them to death?
The problem is getting worse because of the cult of the selfie, as nits are communicated by touching heads (nits cannot, despite the myths, jump, hop, fly or swim) and group selfies encourage this practice. We need to tackle this problem by making selfies illegal, which will have the added bonus of preventing a moronic, pointless activity reaching epidemic levels even greater that of nit infestations.
There is one solution I have not tried – outsourcing. In Chicago, an outlet called Nit Free Noggins has opened, which is a “head lice removal salon”. Terrific idea – if someone tried it in my part of north-west London they would make a fortune. In the meantime, if you don’t fancy a plane journey to Illinois, you could try the UK-based Hair Force, where a “crack squad of lice assassins” will come to your home and vacuum, dehydrate and generally destroy the lice population.
A fashion for shaven heads might be a good meme to get started. Not many people can get away with this look, but anyone under 10 probably can. If we could get Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber to shave their thatches, it could catch on. The clippers will have to be cranked up to No 1 though – nits can live in hair as short as 2mm long.
Or perhaps we should just give up. Accept nits as our friends. Make them pets, possibly. Yes, they’re not beautiful. (I saw them blown up to 20ft high on an Imax screen recently and it was terrifying.) Yes, they are annoying. And yes, they’re very hard to get rid of. But then, that’s true of a lot of the people I know.
If nits are a metaphor for anything, they represent a capacity to endure. In fact there’s a lot we could learn from them – tenacity, self-sufficiency, co-operation. Respect them; learn to get along with them.
And if you can’t do that, there’s always the alternative. Squash them with your thumb and watch them explode. It’s futile, but then, most really good fun is.
