Hair today, gone by lunchtime

‘It’s beginning to grow on me,’ Danielle told me the other day.

She was talking about my hairstyle. My Spanish hairstyle. It’s the product of a Valencian stylist working under time pressure, and it shows.

I’d turned up for my haircut a few minutes ahead of time. A client was paying for his cut, so I assumed I’d be next. I couldn’t work out what the other guy in the waiting area was doing. Expecting a friend, perhaps? I was about to find out otherwise.

When the hairdresser got back to the chair, I stood up ready to be shorn – it always strikes me that any man who’s just had his haircut should be known, at least temporarily, as Sean – since it was by then nearly five past eleven, and my appointment was for eleven.

‘Ah, I’m sorry, no,’ said the hairdresser, pointing at the guy who’d been sitting patiently on one of the chairs, ‘he’s next. I’m afraid I’m running late.’

Well, it was a Saturday, and I wasn’t in a hurry.

‘Shall I pop out for a coffee?’ I asked.

‘Please. That would be so helpful,’ he told me, pathetically grateful that I wasn’t getting annoyed.

I returned twenty minutes later.

‘Perfect timing,’ he told me with pride, ‘I’m just finishing.’

He wasn’t. It took another ten minutes, what with faffing around over payment. It seems the credit card machine wasn’t working particularly well.

By then, there were two other men waiting. They didn’t look too pleased when I stood up to get my hair cut before them.

‘I’m sorry,’ the hairdresser told them, ‘he was here first. And his appointment was for earlier.’

He asked me how I wanted the hair done. This was perhaps where things went wrong. All these conversations were taking place in Spanish. It would be generous to describe my command of the language as limited. I’m not sure he fully understood what I meant. Or that I fully understood what he explained he was going to do.

The next thing I knew was that he’d taken a set of clippers and mown the hair off the left-hand side of my head.

‘Is that OK?’ he asked me.

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. How was he going to get the hair back on if I said that it wasn’t? Information is only as good as any action that can be taken on it, and I could see none that could usefully flow from the truth in this instance.

So he took the hair off the right-hand side of my head. I suppose that at least had the virtue of establishing a kind of symmetry. Not perhaps the balance I’d been seeking, but a balance nonetheless. Which I suppose at least has the merit of being, in some sense, preferable to the opposite.

This only left a sort of forlorn clump in the middle.

That he worked on with scissors, which is rather what I’d hoped he was going to do with most of my hair.

It was all done in about ten minutes and, in my view, the result reflected the time taken. Don’t get me wrong: I hate sitting around making empty small talk while some character fiddles around with my hair, so I prefer the session to be quick. But even so, I appreciate that there’s a bare minimum needed to make a better than botched job of it.

He hadn’t taken that minimum.

The problem with my hair is that it has a mind of its own and a deep sense of the rights free-born hair is endowed with. Discipline? It wants no part of it. Especially if it’s merely regimentation, imposed by me with a brush, usually supported with liberal use of strategically applied water.

This means that it tends to stick up all over the place. Now, the reason I’d come back to this place is that the previous time the hairdresser – a different hairdresser – had done a great job of cutting my hair in a way that meant that the most unruly bits tended to behave in a marginally more respectful manner. It would lie down relatively quietly under the strokes of the brush. I didn’t end up with bits sticking skyward at the back of my head, like a Native American’s feather headdress.

Alas. With this new style, that’s a much-regretted memory of things past. Bits stick up everywhere. Out at the sides. Up at the top. While the sides have all the aesthetic allure of stubble in a recently harvested field.

It’s growing on my wife? Great. Unfortunately, it’s also growing on my head.

My Spanish hair.
Growing on my wife.
Growing on my head. As it chooses

Which is the only redeeming feature of the whole sorry tale. My hair grows fast – no doubt part of its rebellious desire to be taken seriously as an autonomous being – so it won’t be long before I can start to get it to lie down a bit more. Simple length translated into weight will have the desired effect.

At which point I can take it back to be cut again. In the same place maybe. But certainly not by the same hairdresser.