Would YOU let a friend trim your lockdown locks?
MAUREEN LIPMAN did. So did their relationship survive?
IS an accepted fact that many of my friends and colleagues will emerge from this lockdown less surfer-blonde than checkerboard grey.
I, on the other hand, have never felt more smug – because way back in the brunette ages, I decided to let my 100-quid-amonth, chestnut hair dye grow out.
I am so happy with my stripey grey hair. It gets compliments I have never had before. The look is somewhere between the late Anne Bancroft and a badger.
It goes without saying that to achieve this level of naturalism I have to resort to falsehood. Every 12 weeks or so I visit Reluca in London’s Notting Hill and get contrasting dark streaks popped in.
Of course, it goes a bit sepia after 49 days of lockdown, and Lord, it could do with a cut. Except there are no open salons. So I asked my trusty PA, Nats, to cut it. She refused. She rooms in my house so it would be perfectly possible for her to do it but no, she was just too chicken. ‘You won’t like it,’ she said. ‘You’ll get all spiky.’
‘Fine,’ I said huffily, ‘I’ll do it myself,’ and headed for the bathroom. I put a tight rubber band around the tail of hair, as I’d read on YouTube, and prepared to twist, angle and slice, but as I grasped the scissors I could feel her presence.
Nats is an artist by vocation and a dab hand with a Stanley knife. And she could see that even if the dog bit off my hair, it would look better than what I was attempting.
‘Go on then, I’ll do it,’ she said, ‘but it’s not my fault if it goes wrong.’
‘Just cut it up a bit at the bottom,’ I said, airily, ‘it only needs about half an inch. She started snipping. A tiny pile of hair fell. She snipped again. And again. The bathroom fell silent but for the snipping.
‘Is that it? Haven’t you done it now?’ ‘Not quite.’
The snipping had turned to sniping. ‘Are we nearly there?’
‘One side is longer than the other. I’ll just even it up… this side’s a lot longer… I’ll just take a bit more from here…’
Peripherally I could see the pile of hair building up, rug-like, on the bathroom floor. I put my hand up to my neck. I could feel naked nape.
‘Er… don’t take too much Nats, will you? I’m due back in the Street in June, you know and Evelyn can’t have turned into a flapper.’
But she was too busy being a seasoned hairdresser to respond.
Another pile of hair fell from my collar. ‘Right. That’s great, thanks.’
‘Wait, it’s not even,’ she said.
‘No, I like it on a slope… ’
‘Yes, but it won’t match up… sit down!’
I sat down. She returned to her snipping.
‘Thassit… enough!’ I barked, becoming, as predicted, all spiky.
I looked in the mirror. It was a bloody good haircut. I should have given her a hundred quid and a fat tip instead of a cup of tea and an anti-bacterial wipe.
So here I am, one old Baby Boomer, over-Zoomed and undergroomed, stuck indoors for the duration, literally caught redhanded from all that handwashing, marooned with only my acrylics, my crochet hook, my intermediate French audio, my iPad, my bronchial dog, my yoga mat and my trusty PA/hairdresser for company.
‘Time is the devourer of all things,’ said Ovid. And that was a few thousand years before Covid.