Dye, Gwan, dye!

As you probably know by now (unless you're new round here, in which case, hi!), I grew up in New Zealand, but with British parents. I'm not going to say this represented an epic meeting of two cultures, but there was a certain British flavour to my upbringing that was sometimes different from that of my peers - some of whom had influences from parents from Croatia, or Ireland, or wherever else people who send their kids to Catholic school in NZ are likely to come from, and some of whom had been Kiwis for generations.

One of the things from my youth that I associate specifically with my English background is the comics and children's magazines that seemed to float about my home, provenance unknown. We somehow had stacks of comics and annuals dating back to the 1940s or 1950s (which were littered with racist references to the "Japs", "Bosche" and "Eye-ties", by the way) up to the 80s and 90s, ranging from tales of military derring-do for boys (the aforementioned racist WWII bunch), to the more mainstream antics found in Dandy and Beano (the original home of Dennis the Menace - contemporary with the US version, that is), to magazines specifically for girls, such as Jackie and Bunty. These definitely didn't come directly from the UK via my parents, who had said goodbye to the UK for the last time at some point in the mid?-70s, before I was born, and, other than a short trip by my mum in the early-mid 1980s, didn't go back until the 21st century, but I'm unsure exactly how they got there (help me out, M&D?).

I remember, in particular, one issue of a c. WWII-era annual (Tiger, I think - looking online, this seems to have begun publication in 1957, but I'm quite sure they were still harping on about WWII within its pages) which featured a brave Tommy (British) soldier trapped in a prison cell (probably by some nefarious German) who was saved, of all things, by a trained penguin with a key in his beak. Even as a child, I thought that was ridiculous.

Anyway, you'll be surprised to learn there is a point to this trip down Memory Lane to Magazines Past, and the point is that often, especially (to my recollection) in 1980s girls' magazines, they would feature "photo stories", which were often quite comical. Were these something that were found all over the world in the 1980s, or were they specific to British magazines? I certainly don't remember any equivalents from New Zealand. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's an example from the 1980s starring none other than a young Hugh Grant:

And so, when I decided to dye my hair for the first time since I was 14 (and even then, I only did it once), I thought I'd liven up a - let's face it - pretty mundane activity by presenting it to you in (an approximation of) photo story format. Please to be ignoring continuity errors, photos of me without makeup, and the mess behind me in the kitchen. Et voilà (PS this was a lot of wine-fuelled fun!) Click on the photos to enlarge if you can't read the captions:

ALERT! ALERT! Naked Gwan in 5...


4...


3...


2...


1...

I hate to break character, but I think I have dye on my forehead for the next few photos. Just so you know.

I know it should be "turbAnator", but I forgot which steps I went through to get this particular effect with the image editing software and there you go, I'm sacrificing spelling for aesthetics, a dark day for us all