Barbered

First published in Column 8 on the 29^th July, 1992

Some weeks are better than others for making you feel old – well, older, anyway.

This week I went to a barber for the first time in eighteen years, the very barber to whom I used to go when I was a callow youth. He’d lost more hair than I had, which was a sort of consolation – and shifted premises – but little else of the familiar going-to-the-barber routine had changed.

There was still the partnering of tobacco with male tonsure – even in these enlightened days you don’t see tobacco in the ladies’ hairdressers. There was the scent of men’s hair spray. There was the feeling of being like a bed being made as the cloth was swept around me and tucked in at the edges.

There were the large mirrors reflecting a blurred shape that to me looked much the same before and after. And as always, however careful the barber is, there was the rest-of-the-day-awareness inside your singlet of having been barbered.

The same old art of casual conversation was still practiced, an art for which I had no talent in my youth. Since I didn’t know anything about the ‘important’ topics of the day – rugby, politics and rugby, I used to think nothing I had to say could possibly be of interest to a relative stranger, and kept my mouth more closed than open.

This may have been frustrating for the barber, though I guess it would be more frustrating for a dentist. Why do dentists seem to expect just as much conversation from you as barbers? Maybe their meal times are like ours…

After some years of attempting to increase the intellectual level of what passes for conversation at our meal tables each night – ‘pass the salt; he’s flicking rice everywhere, Mum; she touched me; he’s taken all the butter’ – I know now that conversation can be made from any coming together of a couple of minds.

In fact, after the experience of our mealtimes, it was quite stimulating to sit in the barber’s chair and gradually work towards finding some mutual topics of interest.

I’m always more than pleasantly surprised to find that eventually a few snippets of thought (even amongst snipping of hair) will assemble themselves into a conversation. Often some unsuspected mutual ground, as there was in tis case, will once again surprise you as how small the world really is.

Having my hair cut was no longer the ordeal it used to be. (I might even get to like it, and go and find a barber every time I’ve had enough of ‘Is this green stuff really a vegetable?’)

(By the way, in case you suspect, because I haven’t been to a barber for eighteen years, that my hair grows remarkably slowly, and I’m due for a paragraph in the Guinness Book of Records, let me assure you it sprouts at the pace common to all personkind. My home-barber – the one I acquired at marriage – decided she needed a break.)

When you think about it, in my 18 years away from things tonsorial I’d actually gained hair (unlike the barber). Eighteen years ago I had no beard to trim. Intuitively, unlike some male friends of mine, I hadn’t tried to grow one until there was actually something to cover the chin.

My family has pleaded with me for some time now to cut off my beard, their excuse being that they’ve never seen me without it. But in this winter I’d be daft to take off any more hair.

I’ve already made a mental note never to venture near a barber’s during the frosty season, even if I end up looking like Albert Einstein after he’d discovered his relatives.

Mike as Uncle Andrew in The Magician's Nephew -
no beard but an 'orrible wig instead. 
The boy playing Digory is Josh Chignell. 

 The ‘blurred shape’ I refer to was me, unable to see what the barber had done due to my shortsightedness; glasses were always removed while having a haircut even though the barber would invariably ask what I thought of the cut.

I’ve had a second family barber/hairdresser for around thirty years – my eldest daughter, who was trained as a hairdresser. She and my wife take turns, as it were, to cut my hair.

I did take my beard off in Sept 1993, to surprise my wife who’d been in the UK visiting her family. And again, twelve years later (to the month) in order to play Uncle Andrew in an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, by C S Lewis (see photo above). In both case it was grown again pretty smartly.