So yesterday, as you know, was pay day and thankfully that meant I could finally get my haircut. Now I don’t know about you, but I always feel nervous when I’m getting my haircut, like I’ll go in there and ask for a trim only to come out with a skinhead. Although thinking about it, that’s probably due to the time I asked my mates to shave my hair to grade 2 but they did it to grade 0.5 because they didn’t put the correct blade on the razor.
I hated my new haircut, and I desperately tried to hide my newly-bald head where ever I could. At the time the only hat I owned was a red Senate cap which was stretched thanks to my usually flowing locks. This meant that when I wore it with my shaved head it was so big it looked as if Prince Charles had given it to me on a Leukaemia ward, I looked that ill. Not only that, my mum hated the skinhead-look and made me wear a woollen hat in the house at all times for the first 8 weeks. I even wore it to bed.
Luckily yesterday’s haircut was a little less stressful, although I did end up with a grade 1.5 cut on the sides and back – but I asked for that this time. When I was younger, and by younger I mean up to last year – I couldn’t go and get my haircut without taking a picture in to show them what I wanted first . I didn’t trust my own description skills enough to be confident that what I was describing was what I wanted. From the age of about 12 I brought in pictures of Mark Owen in his Take-That heyday, Declan Donnelly (or Dec, as he’s known now) and possibly even Ben from A1. Even though each picture was essentially the same haircut, and we’d been going to the same hairdressers for years, I still had to take in a picture just to be sure.
I didn’t have a picture with me yesterday because the guy who cut my hair knew exactly what to do, and I was confident he’d get it right. Not only that, I didn’t want to be sat in a trendy salon with a picture of Adolf Hitler looking back at me. Yes, that’s right, my hair bears a very close similarity to the Führer himself – although that’s not why I got it cut the way I did – yes he was a great painter, and a very dedicated man, but the killing 11 million Jews stuff sort of over-shadowed those qualities.
The best thing about getting your haircut, for me at least, is getting your hair washed. I love getting my head touched, and a head massage is about as close to sex as I want to go with a guy in a hairdressers. Although yesterday’s hair-washer was a girl, thankfully (it made the erection a little less embarrassing for a start). My girlfriend knows about my love for a good head-touch and yesterday she said “Oh I bet you love that, don’t you? Closing your eyes I bet”. Now this made me think. I do love my head getting touched, but I’ve never once thought about closing my eyes through the experience. Would that make it better? Would I get more joy from it with my little lids closed? I tried it, and the answer was no.
In fact it made me feel a little weird. Like I was almost getting too much pleasure from it. I only closed my eyes for a second but I had to open then right up again because I didn’t like it. Also, the hair washer broke the golden rule of hair washing; she tried to make conversation whilst she had her warm hands on my bonce. I can just about stand talking whilst getting my haircut, but I can’t talk whilst I’m 1. staring at the ceiling, and 2. entering a near state of almost untold pleasure. It just doesn’t work that way. Annoyingly she asked if I was doing anything nice for the weekend, so I felt obliged to answer. This ruined what was otherwise an enjoyable experience. The bitch.
Fresh from getting the best bit of the day ruined, I went over to get my actual haircut. Now generally I’m quite a talkative guy, and although I sometimes say I don’t want to be centre of attention, that’s probably a lie, and especially true when I’m out with my mates, or even just at work. But when I get my haircut I’m very different. I don’t want to talk, and I don’t want some rubbish conversation about what I’m doing at the weekend (I can’t just say Chatroulette, can I?) and I can’t glamorise my office job anymore than “Well I get to finish at half four on a Friday” so I don’t really bother. Then of course there’s the whole “So what do you do when you’re not finishing work at half four on a Friday?” thing and as soon as I mention the word podcasts there’s a whole world of having to tell them what a podcast is, what you do on them, “oh, it’s on computer games?” etc, etc.
In the end I think my hairdresser was pretty tired yesterday so the conversation wasn’t really flowing, which worked out great for me. At Least I don’t have to go back for another 6 weeks.
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