Never mind the gossip, my salon is a place of sanctuary

AS far as I’m concerned, it was an astonishing revelation. Writing in these pages yesterday, my colleague Brenda Power complained that the hairdressers who have banned celebrity magazines from their salons in the wake of Caroline Flack’s tragic death are guilty of ‘pious, virtue-signalling nonsense’.

So far, so on the same page, but then came the eyebrow-raiser. ‘Since I hate hairdressers, and would prefer the dentist any day,’ the always elegant Brenda wrote, ‘gossip mags are the only thing that make the ordeal bearable.’

In that instant, I forgot all about the trashy magazines and felt the same kind of sadness I feel when a child announces they don’t believe in Santa. Because honestly, how can any woman hate the hairdressers?

Surely, after Croke Park on All-Ireland Sunday and possibly Disneyland, the hairdressers is the best place in the world. It is a place of sanctuary, of refuge, a hiding place from the real world. In movies, heroes seek sanctuary in churches and convents and embassies; me, I push open the door of my hair salon and demand that they keep me safe for a few hours.

I’m going this afternoon and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. Having just emerged gasping from an intensive three months of insanely demanding work, I fully intend to waste the whole afternoon in there. I’ve booked in four different appointments, but to be honest, I don’t really care what they do to me. I don’t actually need shellac on my nails in late February – but it will take up more time, and so it’s on my ‘to do’ list. Likewise my eyebrows: since I have worn a thick fringe since the age of two, it is literally impossible to see my brows – but that doesn’t mean I won’t get them pointlessly tinted and shaped this afternoon, while the hours stretch deliciously on.

I know I’m not alone. Every time I’m in, I see other women hiding from their best lives under their anonymous black capes. We line up in front of mirrors that we barely glance at, read about celebrities we’ve never heard of, nibble on coffee biscuits we’d never buy and – in my case at least – eavesdrop on conversations in which we’ve no business. If women want to complain about their husbands, children, colleagues, the weather and the world, their stylists facilitate a good whinge. For those of us who prefer quiet contemplation (even if it’s only of Meghan Markle’s shoes), the hairdressers work around us like industrious Trappist monks.

Older women – especially those living alone – regard their weekly blow-dry as an almost essential respite from a lonely life. I know, because one gave birth to me. And I know, because I gave birth to two, that little girls regard a visit to the hairdressers as the height of sophistication and a sampler for adult life. For those of us in between, it is just a place to breathe slowly and easily and let the rest of the world pass busily by outside.

PERHAPS Brenda has experienced a catastrophic cut that has soured her relationship with the brotherhood and sisterhood of the scissors in perpetuity – though if she did, it was long before I first encountered her and her beautiful, shiny hair. I’ve had a fair few hairdressing malfunctions myself – though to be fair, they’re usually based on wholly unrealistic expectations and a ridiculously optimistic selfimage on my own part. But to be honest, I could leave the hairdressers looking like I’d been dragged through a bush and I’d still have a spring in my step and a smile on the face.

Before we got notions and disposable income in this country, hairdressers were the saviours of women’s sanity.

Salons as sanctuary was the seed that spawned the lucrative spa industry, as savvy entrepreneurs realised that women who wanted a couple of precious hours of downtime would probably pay for twice that length of time. The spa thing doesn’t do it for me – the paper knickers and bathrobes are too reminiscent of a hospital visit – but I relish every wasted moment of my visits to the hairdressers.

If they offered a style that involved washing and drying my hair a dozen times and then sending me home looking exactly the same as I did coming in, I’d pay top dollar for it.

Brenda can stick with her recreational dentistry – but if you’re ever looking for me in a state of total bliss, then you know where you’ll find me.

EVEN as a child, I was never a fan of pancakes so yesterday’s annual celebration of eggs, milk and flour left me as lukewarm as the last pancake in the stack. Besides, if pancakes are all they’re cracked up to be, who don’t people eat them all year round? Crepe, if you ask me.