Hair

All my life I’ve had a sneaking feeling that there are a whole group of essential skills most boys are meant to acquire while growing up that I totally missed out on. The ability to tie a tie is a perfect example of this. My dad never thought to mention it and I think I got one brief lesson from my brother before the first day of secondary school, back when the fashion was to have a knot only marginally bigger than a peanut. As a result I’ve always envied people who can create perfect knots without even looking in the mirror because mine always come out as skewed, mingey coagulations of fabric, even if I toil at them for hours.

Shaving is another one. My father didn’t seem to think this was a rite of passage he needed to be involved in. He was far too busy frantically tapping away on the ZX Spectrum, swearing at the magenta matchstick men on the low resolution screen and enveloping the study in a fug of smoke from his latest packet of Raffles, a cigarette so long it probably could have been used in the pole vault. You entered that room at your peril; it invariably smelled like somebody had set a motorway on fire. So I was given an electric shaver and left to get on with it, and it was many years before I learned the delights of shaving with a blade. Once I did, it was several more before I could walk around in polite company without a bright red top lip and what looked like a neck festooned with stigmata.

The list of things I don’t know how to do is almost endless, though in many cases it’s more about my complete lack of aptitude than any parental neglect. My dad gamely tried to show me how to repair a puncture, he tried to show me how to polish my shoes, but I just couldn’t do it. Either that or - and this is equally likely, if not more so - I was merely displaying an early form of that cunning so common among men, whereby you perform a task dismally in the hope of never being asked again.

One of my shortcomings I put squarely at the feet of my mother though. She was the one that cut my hair until I was about twenty-one. You can’t tell this from my writing (or perhaps you can, in which case you should probably be earning a living showcasing this talent somehow) but I have extremely curly hair, untameable even. And as a child I had no real interest in taming it, which meant that I spent much of my schooldays looking like a mad professor. One occasion sticks with me, when I went to the local newsagent to buy some sweets. Terry, the proprietor, looked at the bags on the counter, then looked up at me.

"Would sir like a comb with that?"

As it happened I didn’t.

There was one attempt to break me out of the pattern of reliance on my mum’s shearing skills when I was about fourteen. Tired of being on snipping duty in the kitchen she packed me off, a crisp tenner in my pocket, with my brother to a tacky looking men’s salon on the edge of town. It was called Marc Antony – of course, back then I didn’t realise that about one in ten salons is called this – complete with those ghastly laminated photos of fashionable males in the window. They looked dated back then in 1988, and since they are almost certainly still in circulation in a barbers’ somewhere I dread to think what they look like now, or indeed whether they’ve ever been in fashion. A stopped clock is right twice a day but these images looked like they were one hundred per cent wrong practically all the time.

I was genuinely nervous as I sat in the chair and the man asked me what I wanted.

“Short back and sides please.” I said. I had rehearsed this but it still sounded, well, silly.

He looked at me with disappointment.

"I bet you’re the sort of person who goes into a shoe shop and says ‘I’d like some shoes please.’"

My initial reaction was to say “how did you guess?” Then I felt like telling him that when you have size 12 feet, as I did, you might as well say that in a shoe shop in any case, because regardless of what you wanted you still wound up buying whatever they happened to have in your size. ‘Next year you'll walk out wearing the boxes’ said my mum each year, a joke that was ageing a lot better than me. Tall and skinny with giant feet, I looked like a golf club wearing a comedy wig.

In the end I decided not to talk back to my surly barber; back in the Eighties hairdressing seemed to be a much more butch profession and besides, he had the power to make me look even more ridiculous, if such a thing was possible. Needing glasses didn’t help because it meant that I didn’t get to see the whole process taking place in front of me. Instead it was like those sequences in television where you get wiggly lines, the image goes fuzzy and then you walk out of the barbers looking like an utter ponce. My brother never had this problem, fundamentally because “utter ponce” was the look he was going for. He was mainlining Brylcreem by then and had spikes and a duck’s arse and everything, and for once I envied how easy he seemed to find day-to-day life which made a refreshing change from him looking covetously at my exam results. This neglects to take account of the fact that he also had a twenty a day fag habit, a squint and the mother of all nervous tics, but the grass is always greener.

By that stage the damage was comprehensively done; the whole experience was terrifying and it put me off going to the barbers’ completely for many years. Not that it mattered much. As “the academic one”, it was a given that I simply wasn’t interested in my appearance. Regrettably, I was nowhere near clever enough to realise that if you weren’t interested in your appearance there was no earthly reason for girls to be interested in it either, or you for that matter. I don’t recall that featuring in any of the textbooks I wasted so much time poring over. If only it had.

What this all amounts to is that I’ve never really understood the nuances of hair styling and I’m not sure I ever will. When I discovered that you could go to a barber and get them to shave your head and take all the problems away I embraced the concept wholeheartedly. So, oddly enough, did my brother. There is a photo of us sitting on the garden bench at home having both asked for a Grade 2. We have the same haircut and practically the same glasses, but the overall effect couldn’t be more different. While I resemble a Romanian orphan, he looks like the brains of a gang of football hooligans, the only thug who can read maps.

The reason I’ve been thinking all of this is that it’s getting to that stage. I can tell because lately I’ve found myself sitting at my desk staring intently at my monitor, mouse in one hand and endlessly fiddling with my hair with the other. If you gave me a cup of tea and a banana I wouldn’t look out of place in the monkey enclosure, which is not to say that I also masturbate at my desk. Well, not until everyone but the cleaners have gone home, anyway. As if that wasn’t enough of an indication, my colleague Phil keeps calling me a hippy, although this isn’t as grave an allegation as it might sound. Phil’s standards are so conventional that his definition of “hippy” is probably wide enough to include anybody who has ever been in the same restaurant as a vegetarian.

All this adds up to only one conclusion. It’s well past time for a haircut.

Whenever my hair gets to this length the tug of war begins. I keep wondering if this is the time that I should go to a salon and get it done properly, to look like people in the magazines and on telly. It would be great to have something choppy and cool, to look like a grown-up, maybe even one of those ones from a shaving advert, given that I’ve even learned to do that nowadays.

But then on the other hand it’s just so easy to just wander into a barber’s and come out with my usual. It feels good to run my hand over, it requires absolutely no attention and it looks all right. Well, it does after the first week - before that Kelly just gives me that disappointed look I’ve come to find so uncomfortable and I get jokes at work about joining the army. You’re either a conscript or a conscientious objector, it seems, there is no middle ground.

This mock agonising is all very well, but sadly this is really nothing more than intellectual gymnastics. You can probably tell. The thing is, every time I get to this stage I genuinely do think all of that, but I know that I’ll crumble this time just like I always do.

In the parallel universe where I have the courage of my convictions I can see the way this story ends as clearly as if it is happening now, because in a funny kind of way it already has. I just know that if I went to a salon, I’d end up in that chair full of dread, thirty-six on the outside and fourteen on the inside, fully aware deep down that “short back and sides” just won’t cut it.