Youngest Daughter has head lice. This is not good. Have spent the last several nights running a nit comb through her lovely long hair, horrified and weirdly fascinated in equal measure by the number of extremely large critters that have been living on her head for the last God-knows-how-many weeks.Apparently 12 million children suffer from head lice infestations in the UK each year. At our end-of-year Pizza Express lunch on Wednesday (almost as bad as a day at Thorpe Park) the number of little people scratching their heads made me realise that our small corner of south-west London must account for a fairly large percentage of this amount.
Apparently, it takes a minimum of three months for an itch to develop. Which means that my poor itchy-headed daughter has been home to these six-legged horrors for at least twelve weeks. Proof, if any were needed, that I am Not A Good Mum. It's no coincidence that while I've been ridiculously preoccupied with Brixton Man and the complexities of our ridiculous on-off on-off relationship, parasites have been colonising Youngest Daughter's beautiful head.
She's been very brave about it. On the first night, after I'd removed a grand total of forty-seven (according to my sources, fifteen is the 'average' amount) she said, good-naturedly, 'Could I keep the biggest ones in a jar, instead of getting a hamster?'
This had me in stitches!
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