Zoë Scholtz

It started, as most revolutions do, with a pair of brown loafers. Okay. Perhaps most revolutions don't start with loafers. But mine did. I am 45, almost 46, and I have spent a significant portion of my adult life working in Finance. I did my corporate years. Deloitte left its mark. Somewhere along the way, I developed a very clear picture of what a CFO was supposed to look like. Black pants. Pretty blouse. Jacket if required. Black shoes. Black belt. Repeat until retirement. Perfectly respectable. Also, as I recently discovered, spectacularly boring. Which is strange, because I don't regard myself as particularly boring. I write. I take photographs. I run. I overland. I'll happily disappear into Botswana, crawl around a factory with a camera, climb into a ridiculously high 4x4 and follow numbers down rabbit holes because something doesn't make sense. My running wardrobe contains enough pink to be visible from the International Space Station. And yet every mo...

When you manage to convince your photographer to take a selfie with you Looking for my look Do you have any idea what the appropriate attire for an 'author' photo shoot would be? No, neither did I, which is why, on the morning of my session I was rushing around like a headless chicken, searching for my best author outfit.   ' Why didn't you do this last night? I asked myself, as I rummaged through the contents of my closet. I was hunting for my favourite jeans, which had pulled a very unwelcome disappearing stunt on me.  I hated packing at the best of times, probably as a result of living as a nomad due to traveling between home and boarding school and then later on, home and varsity res. I never could decide what to take along, and usually included way more than necessary - because, well, you know... you never know what you might  need. The chaos that was our bedroom looked alarmingly similar to when I was getting ready to go away on extended vacati...

Meeting my hairstylist match  Six years ago I had sat in the exact same hair salon, although this time my reasons for being there were (thankfully) much different. In 2015 I'd been having a serious meltdown.  'Why?' You may ask.  Well, some three months after being discharged from hospital, my long blonde hair (at the time reaching well below my shoulder blades) had had enough of all the gunk that had been pumped into my body to try and save my life and so it rebelled and started to fall out - b adly! According to my mom, I was bald for rather a long time as a small child. When my hair eventually started to grow, mom kept on cutting it to encourage my strands to proliferate. As a combined outcome from mom's brave (but wise) intervention and probably also genetics, I wound up with a lot of hair as an adult. To be losing most of it was upsetting to say the least, and I came to dread brushing it, since each time I'd transfer more and more strands from my head to the ha...