There are various parts of our bodies which we can never see directly, even with a mirror. One such place is the top of your head and I got to wondering last night just what mine looked like. I have, to the best of my knowledge, never seen it even after much contortion of the neck and attempts to get light to travel other than in straight lines1. I’ve never even seen a photograph of it. For all I knew it was covered in strange blodges and spots. It might even be bright blue rather than the sort of pink colour of most of the rest of my skin.
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So, thought I last night, why don’t I rectify this by taking a photograph of it. Easier said than done it turned out. I first tried sticking the camera on a tripod, turning on the self-timer and bending down in front of it. That didn’t work. My hair flopped downwards and the picture looked like the top of the head of someone who was bending forward at a somewhat unnatural angle. Nope, the only answer seemed to be to sit in a chair and hold the camera over my head. That turned out to be fraught with difficulty too. I took a couple of dozen pictures of parts of my head until I managed to get one of the whole of it.
Still, I got one in the end and jolly good it is too. I present it here for your edification. I was quite disappointed to learn that there’s nothing particularly unusual up there but at the same time relieved to find that there’s no evidence of cancer of the scalp or anything else which might suggest my imminent demise. The pattern of my advancing baldness is different to what I expected but does completely explain just why I’ve found it impossible to part my hair in the past few years — there’s precious little there to part.
This almost, but not quite, completely useless project has now set me to thinking that perhaps I should embark on a series of photographs of other parts of my body which I’ve never seen. The back of my neck and the bit behind my ears come to mind although I think I’ll leave the more intimate bits unphotographed, at least for public viewing.
1 OK all you pedants — geodesics.
Posted 9 November 2005, 01:30 GMT