Haircut

I’ve just had a haircut.

I once had an idea. I was going to open a silent hairdressers – just an ordinary, common or garden unisex barbershop with one difference. No talking allowed. No greeting, no chitchat, no explaining how you wanted your hair. Absolute silence.

You would enter the shop and be handed a large book with laminated pages showing models with every hairstyle imaginable, (starting with timeless classics like the short back and sides, moving on to whatever the current E4 presenters were sporting, followed by daring and vintage styles) and you simply point to whichever cut you’re after. The hairdresser nods, and indicates a chair that you sit in. He or she cuts your hair. In silence. You pay. You leave.

To me, this would make the whole experience of getting my hair cut infinitely more bearable. It’s not just that I don’t like small talk. In fact, I don’t mind small talk. I often enjoy a bit of banter with the nice man in the newsagents, or the person preparing my baked potato in the café. And in my current job in a theatre bar, it always makes things more interesting when the punters have a bit of a friendly chat. But in the barber’s you are literally trapped. It's like being in a benign hostage situation: you are totally at the mercy of the person cutting your hair. And the choice is simple (not that the choice is yours): awkward chitchat that will have to be extended way beyond its natural course, or an even more awkward silence where you begin to wonder why they’re not talking to you. Do I give off unfriendly vibes? Do I look uncool? Boring? Tory?

There’s also the mirror problem, which is two-fold. Firstly, call me old-fashioned, but if I’m looking at someone in a mirror, I don’t feel like I’m actually looking at them. I’m looking at their reflection, their double, their ghost. I have to resist the urge to turn round and look them properly and get a scissor-blade in the eye. It’s in the same way that I can’t have a conversation with a taxi driver’s eyes in a rear-view mirror – it just doesn’t feel right. You might as well have a conversation with someone's shadow.

The second facet of the mirror problem is that you have to spend an extended amount of time looking at your own reflection. I avoid this studiously in everyday life, because I’m invariably disappointed about how I look. That’s not self-deprecation; I think most people have a skewed self-image and are hyper-critical about their appearance. So watching my doughy face engage in entirely forced and laboured social interaction (the furrowed brow of feigned interest, the horrible fake laughter) is not my idea of a good time.

Next on my list of barber-related neurosis is that I just don’t speak the language. I often get asked if I want the back of my hair ‘tapered or natural’, and I still don’t know the difference between the two (I usually plump for natural, because it sounds less dramatic). I find it disquieting that the hair-attendants frequently ask if what they are doing with your barnet is to your liking. I really have no answer to that. And on the few occasions that I have raised objections, asking for a bit more off the top or a bit shorter at the back or sides, my request has been met with a confused expression, as if I’ve just asked them to shave a swastika into my pubic hair. Either they counter with a load of incomprehensible barber-jargon, to which I crumble and reply ‘Ah yes, I see what you mean, just carry on the way you’re doing it’, or they action my request with a look that says, ‘OK, if you want to walk round for the next six weeks looking like a total twatbag then it makes no odds to me’. 

And at least once during each haircut I have that moment of panic when I see the half-completed state of the haircut and become convinced I’m going to leave the shop looking like Forrest Gump’s less attractive brother.

So you begin to see why the prospect of a visit to the hairdresser doesn’t fill me with joy. In fact I dread it, and I will usually put it off until I’m mulletted beyond endurance.

Today it wasn't too bad. Topics of discussion: Liverpool, Liz Taylor, roadworks and Gok Wan. He was friendly, asked me no awkward hair questions, but best of all, he was very quick. I tipped generously.