You don’t expect people to take their political inspiration from Jon Bon Jovi. Or at least I don’t. Maybe that’s terribly presumptuous of me. Maybe some people do. ‘Tommy used to work on the docks/ Union’s been on strike/ He’s down on his luck, it’s tough/ so tough.’ Maybe that’s what got Tony Blair up in the morning. A decade of New Labour, ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’. It’s not entirely impossible, although I did always think that New Jersey’s most accessible rock star was more about bouffant hair and catchy guitar solos than hardcore political philosophy. Mind you, I always thought much the same about Tony Blair.
He was in a colour supplement this weekend, anyway (Bon Jovi, not Blair) wearing what seemed to be a newish hat as the head of his own philanthropic foundation. So there’s politics there, obviously, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. No, it was something he said about Barack Obama. ‘I think the world of this President,’ he said, ‘and I’m watching him go grey in nine months.’
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He was right, of course. (Maybe he always is. Maybe ‘bad medicine’ really is good for you, counter-intuitive as it might seem.) That close-cropped fluff on the President’s skull has indeed swiftly faded from a youthful black to a tarnished silver since he came to office. To be fair, it has periodically grown dark again, but that never lasts long. Either way, I’m guessing that when a man dyes his hair, Jon Bon Jovi can tell. They’re the same age, him and Barack Obama. A year ago they looked it. Now, not so much.
Me, I started going grey earlier this year, after we had a baby. Not wildly grey, just a smattering in the beard and the odd streak up top.
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