FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM

Clue: They’re hiding behind your ears

Nits! Nits are not something I’ve thought much about since I last saw the nit nurse, sometime around 1982. Nitty Nora was a fearsome creature who would drag a nit comb through your hair in front of the whole school and loudly announce whether or not you were to be considered a source of pestilence. A bit like the Hogwarts Sorting Hat, except there were only two houses: ‘Fine, Off You Go,’ or ‘Filthy, Dirty, Infested Little Child.’ If you were in the latter house, you’d be given a bottle of insecticide and have to spend the next week with the stink of nit lotion emanating for a good two yards around your pestilent head.

Has it just occurred to you, as it has to me, that the Sorting Hat would be a likely culprit for spreading head lice throughout Hogwarts? This makes me think that the makers of head lice shampoos are missing a trick. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Lyclear. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Home Head Lice Remedy. No? Whatever, muggles.

Up until recently, I’d not been thinking about nits at all. And this was mainly because I did not have any nits to think about. But things change. Something crawled into my hair one day. And the next thing I knew, I was thinking about nits non-stop.

There are few things as grim as combing actual crawling lice out of one’s hair. Especially when they have clearly been there for quite some days. Reproducing. Building a future. Creating a dynastic legacy. You’d think nits would be tiny little things, but some of the fuckers on my head were big enough to be leashed and walked up and down the promenade, like Gerard de Nerval with his lobster. I was getting a headache from them stomping around on my scalp, while surrealist poets twirled their moustaches in my mind.

The only reliable way to destroy nits is with fire. But don’t bother googling ‘how to burn lice from your head without burning your hair’ because the internet has nothing helpful to say on the topic. And since this is not Hogwarts, there’s no magic remedy. Only cheap conditioner, fine-toothed combs and endless patience.

Nit removal feels like an endless labour. A Sisyphean task. You finally get what the Greeks were mithering on about. But there’s nothing else for it except to keep going.

As I sat there one evening, my crawling scalp smothered in conditioner and tea tree oil, I reflected on how my sister, whose children were almost certainly the bringers of this nitty plague, had said to me, “Please don’t write about this on your substack.”

“I won’t,” I said, lyingly.

I hadn’t actually been planning to. But as soon as she said that, I knew I would have to.

Why? Well, because I’m a monster.

Sorry, did I say monster? I meant writer, of course.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that it’s basically the same thing. The Sorting Hat said Slytherin, and no one thought it had stuttered.

Sure, you can ask your sister who loves you to not write about something you fear may be potentially embarrassing or awkward. And your sister who loves you will of course respect your feelings about the matter. But ask a writer not to tell a story about the things that live inside – or on top of – her very own head? Hmm.

Ironically, or perhaps just coincidentally, my sister hates being told what to do. She responds with effervescent fury to the mere inkling of a suggestion of reasonable advice.

“I have a terrible headache,” she’ll say, turning a deathly pale moonface on me.

“Had you had any paracetamol?” I’ll innocently ask.

A dark cloud will pass over the moon. No, she hasn’t had any paracetamol. And now she can’t have any paracetamol, because that would be like taking advice, which is intolerable. She will just have to spend the next 24 hours in horrible pain and discomfort because I’ve made it impossible for her to take a paracetamol without feeling like she’s giving in to an assault on her personal autonomy.

So it’s not like she doesn’t understand that telling me not to do something is inevitably going to produce the opposite result.

And, after all, these are MY nits. They’re on my head, crawling around behind my ears and drinking my blood. They’ve probably drunk so much of my blood that my brain is depleted and I’m walking around in a permanent fog. Maybe I’d have other things to write about if I didn’t have these enormous beasts siphoning off the blood supply to my brain twenty-four hours a day. Had my sister even considered that?

It’s not that I don’t care about my sister’s wishes and feelings. On the contrary. There are very few people whose wishes and feelings I care about more. And honestly, revealing my lice-ridden status to the world is a little embarrassing, so I get it.

But I think that ultimately it comes down to this: I, too, am a nit.

Like all writers, I’m crawling around where I’m not wanted, feeding from the heads of other people, sucking on their blood. A bit like a vampire, but without the grandiose narcissism. Just a nit. A louse, being led around in circles by a surrealist poet who fell out of the Sorting Hat and whose moustaches are now permanently entangled with the tendrils of my hair.

Yes, my head is an odd and tragic little place. But it’s mine. And, ultimately, isn’t that more important than respecting a loved one’s wishes and feelings?

If you’re reading this, then I guess you have the answer.

Actual scenes on my scalp, under a microscope