Black

Perusing the shelves of my local branch of Periodicals & Other Ephemera R Us the other day, I noted the existence of a glossy magazine called Black Hair. On the cover was a photograph of a woman with black hair. Leafing through it, I saw it was stuffed full of other similar photographs, and although I did not read any of the articles, all of them seemed to focus exclusively on the particular, narrow topic of women with black hair. Being a man with almost entirely grey hair, I replaced the magazine on the shelf. Plainly, I was not the kind of reader it was aimed at. But then neither were some of the adjacent titles, which included Black Shirts, a magazine for the fascist community, Black Narcissus, for sexually frustrated nuns, and Black Pudding, which seemed to be devoted wholly to celebrating the coagulated and sausagised blood of pigs. I looked in vain for the publication I was seeking – Tiny Enid’s favourite comic, Boo Boo’s Hooba Nooba – turned on my heel, and headed on up the hill towards a clump of aspens, where I sat down and lit a cigarette and looked at aspens, in a clump.