I dragged Pär into a beauty supply shop with me, despite his insistence that he didn't want to buy any beauty. It was a good place to look for hair gel, I told him; he's been wanting to experiment with that ever since he cut his hair short.

He poked around in the men's hair product aisles while I went to pick up conditioners and dye. (I still get the occasional urge to color my hair jet-black, but after five years of dealing with dark brown roots, these days when the urge hits I just play around with temporary stuff that washes out after a few weeks.) I came back to find Pär looking irritated.

"Everything here is supposed to make your hair all slick and smooth," he grumbled. "I want something that's going to fuck my hair up and make it feel like straw."

"I keep telling you, only bleach is going to do that."

"I don't want my hair to be bleached," he said. "I just want it to be in really bad condition!"

He's been going on about this for months. Somewhere along the line, he decided that straw-like hair was his personal ideal. I don't know where he picked up this concept, but he seems pretty firmly set on it.

"Look," he said in a tone of outrage, pointing to some bottles on the shelf. "I keep seeing labels that say 'For Damaged Hair', but then when I read the fine print, it turns out they're supposed to make it less damaged, not more!"

We went to the checkout counter and I bought my stuff. The saleswoman started throwing little free samples into the bag for me. She asked Pär if there were any types of beauty product that he wanted to sample.

"Do you have anything that's really bad for your hair?" he asked her, hopefully. I quietly gazed at the ceiling and waited. Pär waved his hands around in wide enthusiastic gestures, meant, presumably, to evoke the image of damaged hair. "Like, something you can put in your hair that makes it all rough and dried out?"

The saleswoman smiled uncertainly at him. She appeared to be quite charmed but also utterly confused by him, an expression I have often observed on the faces of women encountering Pär for the first time. "We have some things to make your hair softer..." she began.

"No," he sighed, "thank you anyway."

Pär's quest to make his hair more straw-like continues. He really does have terrific hair, soft, thick, and silky no matter what he does to it, and it's a source of perplexity to him. Me, I have to use at least two conditioners to make my kinky hair be anything close to silky, so I don't have much sympathy for his "problem". But you know, we all have our own goals to aim for, and I wish him well with his.

He is now of the opinion that the entire concept of shampoo is nothing more than a marketing crock, an advertising plot foisted upon us to make us think we need to spend money on expensive products. For the past several weeks, he's been using plain bars of soap to wash his hair. I think he's overlooking the fact that most people want to clean their hair without drying it out and roughening it too much, but he does have something of a point. In any case, he's happy with his soap.

Pär's hair is pretty short these days since he last cut it, and that cut is starting to grow out to the length where I think it looks best: still layered fairly neatly, but long enough to have character. I mentioned it to him.

"Your hair looks really good. It's never looked so good as this."

"Do you know why?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.

I recognised the didactic tone of voice. "Here we go again," I sighed.

"Daily soapings!" he announced triumphantly.

"Uh huh."

"Feel it!"

I dutifully felt his hair. "It's starting to lose its natural silky softness," I said, mainly to be nice. It wasn't really true.

"Not fast enough," he declared. "I need a harsher soap. With bleach in it, or some corrosive agent."

"I don't think there's a big market for soap with corrosive agents in it," I said. "Maybe you should switch to dish detergent. Comet. Or that bathtub scrubbing stuff."

"Ammonia!" he said, his eyes lighting up.

So I've moved our bathroom cleansers out to the kitchen, just in case Pär should see them and be hit with sudden inspiration while showering. As far as I'm concerned, it's all good practice for having Small Tot around.