Make THE CUT

AN UNKEMPT COLIN RELUCTANTLY FINDS A NEW HAIRDRESSER

I’m just back from two days staying with my mother in her little house in her big retirement village, where it was very quiet, though Mum wasn’t, thank goodness. There’d have been no point in going all the way to Christchurch if she’d had nothing to say to me. It turned out she had quite a lot, but then she usually does.

She reckons she’s still making up for me leaving home when I was 17. Sometimes she still treats me like I’m 17 too. On the second morning of my stay, we were about to drive across town and visit Dad’s grave when she gave me a critical look-over. “Have you combed your hair?” she wanted to know. “No,” I told her. “Why not?” “I don’t comb my hair.” “Don’t you have a comb?” Mum wanted to know. “No.” “Why not?” “Because I don’t comb my hair.” “Ever?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

Mum sighed and stared at me as if at a stranger. My hair might have been looking a bit more unkempt than usual. It had been a while since my last trim, but having moved back to Auckland, I was between hairdressers.

I tried to explain, but Mum didn’t understand that sort of thing either.

As far as she’s concerned, a hairdresser is simply someone, anyone, who cuts your hair. To me, a hairdresser is much more and once you find a good one, you hang in and never stray. It’s a bit like being married, except, sadly, you can’t take your hairdresser with you if you move to a new town.

This happened to me a little over three years ago when we shifted from

Auckland to Wellington and I lost Kay, the woman who’d been cutting my hair for decades. I didn’t need to say anything to her about what to do with her scissors when I took my seat.

Instead, we’d gossip. Moving away from Auckland and losing Kay was one of the hardest things about going to Wellington. But eventually I found a new Kay – just as Kay had assured me I would. Her name is Jemma, but now I’ve lost her too, thanks to our recent temporary move back to Auckland.

“You’ll find someone new,” Jemma told me too, but I didn’t want anyone new and instead I went looking for Kay, but she was gone, her old salon occupied by another business altogether. Not knowing quite what to do, I didn’t do anything at all until I became so unkempt, I threw caution to the winds and went to the hairdresser up the road.

I was so agitated about putting my head in a stranger’s hands that I made my new hairdresser, Nina, nervous, but she recovered quickly and restored me to some semblance of tidiness, though still uncombed, of course.

One of the older hairdressers at the salon recognised me from the Weekly. “I’ve been reading that column of yours forever, Col,” he said.

“Only almost forever,”

I told him.