Ginger Whinge

They’re the breed everyone loves to hate. Stand easy you pit bull type terriers, you’re not out of the dog house but you’re way down on the list, I’m talking red-heads.
Yes, copper-tops, carrot tops, Duracell heads, strawberry and Titian blondes, gingers (to rhyme with kingers) call them what you will, and you’ve a thousand different options, they’ve been feared, revered but mainly mocked for millennia.
While the ginger inflicted have had their moments - stand up Boudicca, the Tudors, Churchill and, um, Robin Cook - they’ve also included Judas, Cromwell and Lizzie Borden the axe murderess among the ranks, which has hardly helped the cause.
To anyone not sporting a shock of red the very word ginger conjures up images of wild, Celtic temperaments, indeed, most natural redheads in this country can traces their genes back to Britain and Ireland’s earliest settlers some 40 to 50,000 years ago.
The largest percentage of red heads remains in Ireland and Western Scotland while Wales and Cornwall boast a sizeable ginger contingent.
As the British gene pool turned into a reservoir so gingerness spread itself thin, to the point that natural red heads became something of a rarity. There’s safety in numbers and there's safety in merging in with herd. Those of a ginger persuasion have neither luxury. They stick out and everyone lets you know it.
My name is Cris Warren and I have been ginger for 37 years.
Last summer I was sat outside a cafe with my then six month old daughter in my arms feeding her a bottle. A family was sat a couple of tables over and the teenage daughter observing my red bearded self, commented, perhaps louder than she had intended, “he looks like an orangutan.”Her father made a “shushing” noise. He needn’t have. With apologies to orangutans, who are of course apes, I couldn’t have given a monkey’s. In fact, I didn’t even look up (although I did note when they left, that she possessed a face resembling a bucket with a dent in it and a backside so huge only someone in severe denial or a degree in irony would think to encase it in pink Velcro track suit trousers).
It’s water off a ginger crested duck’s back for me. I don’t think a month has gone by in my entire life when some wag, be they complete strangers, work colleagues or lifelong friends, hasn’t felt fit not to make some comment or reference to the colour of my hair.
Sometimes these are complementary, sometimes surprisingly rude, most of the time they’re good natured barbs meant as terms of endearment, yet on any level all of them cite my distinguishing feature and my character as being somehow one and the same.
Never mind my drop dead good looks, huge intellect, generosity and general out and out gorgeousness. Or even my saint like modesty. The fact that I have red hair seems to act as a visual cue for some people to make snap judgements about my temperament, my lineage and my choice of sun block.
My hair is their licence to take the mick.
As a kid it used to get to me. Not any more, I simply don’t care. My skin might be fair and start to burn if I so much as look at a holiday brochure, but it’s also thick. I’ve heard every ginger dig and diss going, and now they just bounce off my expressionless face.
I don’t know why some people dislike red-heads or even like red heads yet idly make reference to Duracell and carrot tops (have they not noticed how the top of a carrot is actually, like, green?) and what not whenever the topic of gingerness crops up.
I’ve heard arguments that while the trembling majority always love a whipping boy, in this PC age, there’s precious few minorities left you can legally take a verbal pop at as a cover for their own insecurities.
Perhaps there’s some truth in that.
Here’s an example.
Following months of snide remarks and cat calls, all centred on the colour of her hair, the stunningly pretty, articulate and funny 13 year old, ginger headed daughter of a friend of mine has decided enough is enough and has dyed her hair brown, surely the dullest, most inconspicuous colour on the spectrum. Which, of course, was her reasoning.
I sympathise with her. Mainly with the fact that her contemporaries are such pathetic sheep that challenged with a classmate who stands out from the flock, their response is to bully and cajole until she becomes ‘one of them’.
By the time she’s in her late teens I’m confident that she’ll embrace her gingerness - certainly there’ll be many, many young men who will want to - and not have to rely on the approval of her classmates to live her own life.
In the meantime she’s keeping her head down and hoping the insults will go away as long as her roots remain covered.
What’s especially interesting about her story is the hypothesis it throws up, because her half sister, who goes to a different school, is mixed race. If she had come home and asked her parents for permission to bleach her skin because of the trouble her colouring was causing her what sort of uproarious reaction do you think there would be?
Of course, you’re on dodgy ground if you equate the half-witted comments of some towards ginger hair with those of racists and bigots. But, in the same breath surely prejudice is prejudice in whatever shade it manifests itself and I like to think I wouldn’t ever dignify discrimination by acknowledging it.
When my daughter was born the number one question I was asked was a loaded, “is she...um..y’know, ginger?”. “No” I found myself quite unashamedly replying, “sort of sandy, strawberry blonde...”