Pubic Panic

I once sellotaped my head-hair onto my pubic area. At primary school I was moved on a year due to being cleverer than my contemporaries. I never considered this an advantage as it meant that for the rest of my schooldays I was a year younger than my classmates. In puberty this can prove crucial in a number of not-so-subtle ways.

 One of these was pubic hair growth. Being 12 not thirteen was a big deal. Being thirteen not fourteen was an even bigger one.  When changing for gym or swimming the presence or otherwise of pubic hair was of vital importance – a defining moment no less. Well, for me it was.

Older boys had pubic hair I didn’t. What to do? Manufacture some!  Snip some from the head and attach to pubic area? Brilliant!! I toyed with the idea of elastoplasts, thinking it may match my skin tone, but it was too dark, if only you could have gotten the clear stuff back then. I tried glue – but it doesn’t work well with skin and hair, don’t ask me why, I’m not a chemist. Sellotape doesn’t work much better but by this time it was worth a try and I was desperate. My school days were a series of humiliations and failures as it was, so I was determined to win on this one. I would have pubic hair and that was that. I spent ages in the toilet at home. My mother and father must have thought I was merely masturbating. Indeed, I’m pretty sure they would have preferred that I was if they’d have known what I was really up to, attempting to simulate pubic maturity by snipping off hair from my head and attaching it to sellotape and then attempting to secure it onto my groin. The stuff of child psychologists, I fear.

The end result was impressive enough, admittedly to my desperate young mind, for me to attend school with my underpants full of sellotape and hair. I got through the changing room experience without comment.

Trouble is that when your swimming, water tends to have a degenerative effect on any glue-based adhesive. Afterwards, I put my trousers straight on over my wringing-wet swimming trunks and hoped no-one would wonder why there were pieces of hairy sellotape floating about the pool.