Headhunting

Going to the barbershop is not usually an openly emotional experience.

In my youth it was a place of dread. This was because the reputation of the local barber, ominously nicknamed "Slash Harry". He was the old, traditional style practitioner with blunt scissors, a toothless comb, a shop floor very rarely swept and a conversational style centred around football, holidays, immigration and his mother in law.

On one occasion he caught the lobe of my ear with his clippers. You would not think that a small fleshy protuberance could contain so much blood. He dabbed at the wound, in front of an increasingly nervous assembly of waiting customers, with a styptic pencil intended to stem the flow. He asked if he should wrap it up and I recall saying in shock, that I would just take it with me as it was.

As a teenager I looked to have a bit more in a haircut and went to a proper ladies hairdressing salon in the town. This was also a traumatic experience, not down to any fault of the stylists but down to my shyness and embarrassment of unwittingly staring down a cleavage or having said boobs brushing against me as scissors were skillfully operated in close proximity.

I often felt hot and bothered and to such an extent that I could quite easily steam up the whole of the shop window single handedly.

In my student years I could get away with no hairstyle at all. A floppy fringe went well with donkey jacket, combat trousers and suede boots.

I had to smarten up when entering full time employment for the first time but my job involved a lot of driving and so if I felt a haircut was necessary I would just seek out a barbers wherever I happened to be. There was no consistency in my cut illustrating that unlike McDonalds you just cannot rely on the same product every time in that sphere of business.

A lot of people eventually settle down to a sole barber or hairdresser, with the selected salon assuming a role only really matched by the parish priest, bank manager and publican.

There is a certain comfort in the routine of getting a haircut and a definite feeling of invigoration after the deed has been done. I can well understand how my wife can spend three to four hours having a hair-do for all of the assumed benefits of being in good company, chatting in confidence and that holistic good feeling that accompanies it.

It was only by my fourth decade that I could count myself as a loyal customer and patron of an establishment in my local town centre. It is nice to just wander in and entrust everything to an expert. My perception of a visit to a barber had, from my early years, been that they would only attempt what you asked them to and no more. In the better salons it is a case of being told what would suit you best and that is an unrivalled personal service.

My workload continued to keep me on the road and a brief glimpse of an unkempt and neglected hairline in my rear view mirror would get me thinking about seeking an out of town salon. It was then a case of having to avoid my regular stylist for fear of causing upset until my hair had grown back to cuttable length.

I did experiment with different appearances but mainly out of boredom or just as a bit of latent rebellion. There was a very cropped cut that made me look like a football hooligan, a return to the floppy fringe although in my fifth decade no longer endearing,cute and geeky and on a visit to Florence, Italy a bit of a hatchet job down to a misunderstanding in language terms.

I do have a challenging hairline and have inherited a receding hairline from my Father.

The impact of a thinning forehead of hair and a monk-like bald patch has, I admit, had some effect on my confidence in more recent years.

I have resisted going for an all over clipper cut opting for a sort of comb-over or a return to a longer fringe.

On a hot day or after strenuous exercise the cover-up operation fails miserably and I resemble an overcooked or boiled ham.

So, just today I made the decision to have a drastic cut.

It was an easy decision to make at what I now regard as my new local barber, a brash Turkish run shop on a busy road just off the city centre.

In return for asking for a  "Number 2-all over" my previous resistance and reluctance to accept my baldness simply fell away.

Each stroke of the clippers accentuated the shape of my head which, frankly, I had not appreciated as it had been concealed for decades under my largely unruly mop. It surprised me as being quite a reasonably regular one.

I felt a confidence and assurance from seeing my reflection in the salon mirror which was a new and exciting sensation.

All of my worries were as nothing and I left the salon proud to be the newest recruit to the middle aged shaven head club.