Case against deforestation

Iswore I wasn’t going to return to the hairdressers after cutting my own locks during lockdown. But then I began to have grave intellectual doubts about how it looked. Taking the scissors and cutting layers into my mane seemed like a good idea at the time, but a few weeks later I had begun to look like Rod Stewart.

So I folded and went to a salon where the hairdresser told me that when the stampede for haircuts first began, he went from one bag of rubbish to five full bags.

Good thing I’d waited and got him on a slow day, because that means I’m now in a quiet sixweek cycle. I was wondering what hairdressers did with all that sudden accumulation of chopped hair, hoping some of it was going to be analysed to see what it revealed about our health during incarceration.

Hindsight about the hirsute would have been interesting.

I was also wondering if lockdown had put paid to the curious habit of completely shaving or waxing one’s genital area so that it resembles that of a prepubescent.

Once regrowth has broken through the ingrown hair stage to a pubic prickle, perhaps people revert to letting their hair grow wild and free as nature intended. It’s a lot of money (approximately $60-$70) to spend on denuding ‘‘down there’’ hair. And think of the poor plumbers, who have to remove hair shavings from blocked drains. Yuck.

What is so objectionable about genital hair? Haven’t these deforestationers seen those T-shirts that did the rounds during the Bush administration? On one side there was a photo of George Bush, while on the other was a photo of a pubic triangle. Underneath one was the caption ‘‘Good Bush’’ while underneath George Dubya was the caption ‘‘Bad Bush’’.

And that was in an era when we thought that president was an imbecile. These tempestuous days, I’m surprised no-one has come up with a T-shirt with an orange Trump on the front that says, ‘‘Orange is definitely not the new black’’.

But back to the full Brazilian, which became fashionable with the widespread availability of porn. Much has been written about those infantalising their genital area who perversely believe that looking like a child will make you more sexually attractive.

Surely this is another lesson we can take away from lockdown. Grow up and own your own thatch.

Back in the 1450s people would don a merkin – a pubic wig to cover up signs of disease such as syphilis. Centuries later, Hollywood porn actors would wear merkins if, due to age, they were follically challenged, or wanted to hide their genitals from being caught on camera.

We should be proud of our pubic hair and let it grow untamed in the spirit of lockdown when, for a brief moment in time, we made a lot of noise about appreciating nature’s burgeoning flora and fauna.

Wanting to look like a child is a sign of arrested development. Genital bareness might be a turn-on for paedophiles, but do we want to ape their horrid predilections?

On that topic, it is so dispiriting to see the return of footage and photos of Madeleine McCann. If there is the flimsiest development in the case of her disappearance, must we see her image once again reverberating round the globe?

Why not run the story without her photo and background archival film footage? Let this unintended celebrity rest in peace rather than keep breaking her into smaller and smaller pieces. Until there is a definite lead, there is no story.