Who are the strange hairy men in our mirrors (and on television)?

The man in the mirror is increasingly a stranger. A very hairy stranger, save where I have long been bald and the best my testosterone can produce is a sort of minimal, disconsolate fluff.

Otherwise my vast hebridean head is increasingly encircled by a thick perimeter of greying heath, like the rings of Saturn – the eyebrows increasingly a tribute act to Denis healey, even my ears producing white, dismal wisps.

Who does my reflection remind me of? Friar Tuck? Sorley MacLean in old age or an incipient Professor Calculus? But it has, of course, been eight weeks since I last entrusted my locks to a barber – and, since Monday, March 23, it has been quite impossible.

I am scarcely alone. Right now, doleful hair-don’ts are all around us. A glance at PMQs suggests the country is currently commanded by an imploding, platinumblond haystack with a Prime Minister dimly glimpsed below.

ITV’s Robert Peston is well on his way to resembling the Wild Woman of Borneo. Daniel Sandford of the BBC, a friend tartly observes, increasingly reminds him of wild-eyed Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Jeremy Corbyn may soon be invited to audition for Gandalf, and Richard Leonard puts one in mind of a crumpled Liberace.

One would no more look for sartorial example from typical middle-aged men, of course, than for exemplary social distancing on Normal People. But at least we can enjoy delicious gossip about public personalities with suspiciously good hair. As the Queen rapidly reinvents herself as Broadcaster of the Year, how does her timeless silvery helmet remain so immaculate? Are there furtive Windsor visits by a welder?

It would all be darkly funny were it not, when you think about it, so sad. There is something warping, week upon week, about living in a society where you cannot – beyond your own household – touch anyone. Where you have to queue for practically everything a coffin’s length apart; skip on and off the pavement lest you come within two calamitous metres of some anonymous granny; inwardly seethe as you are overtaken by a sweaty, puffing jogger.

IDIDN’T realise what, week after week, this is doing to me till, the other day and on the garden path, I caught myself socially distancing my own father. Or when it seemed the endless ages of eternity, in Waitrose the other week, before the lass behind the fish counter cottoned on, after the umpteenth time I had gone ‘agag!’ behind my mask, that I was desirous of some haddock.

Things once routine are now but the blue remembered hills. I recall wistfully my last meal in a restaurant, the charming Petit Paris in edinburgh’s Grassmarket, where I could savour the best onion soup on earth and practise my terrible French. When this is all over, will it still be there? Will barmen remember how properly to pull a pint of Guinness?

When might I feel able to hop on the bus for a jaunt to Penicuik without feeling as if I were rolling the dice with pestilence and death?

No one jokes about coronavirus. It is twice as contagious as seasonal flu and, probably, ten times as lethal. But the social costs of lockdown are, in their own way, insidious and corrosive evils. With each passing week we are the more conditioned to distrust.

Infants and the smallest children are denied the least interaction with each other, older offspring denied their education – increasingly by irresponsible trade unionism, not by any meaningful threat to their health. The crisis has shown the best in us: generosity, kindness, imagination and enterprise and phlegmatic good humour. But it has also brought hoarding, thuggery, hysteria, conmen and price-gouging.

Men, famously, do not as much eat as refuel, and in the same spirit a haircut is a nuisance to be executed as rapidly as possible. It need not be unpleasant. The last chap to shear me was a fragrant Sicilian, who not only did cool stuff like popping a flaming spill by each ear and spritzing me with rosewater but happily bantered about Il Commissario Montalbano. (Well, it seemed a safer topic than the Mafia.)

But the shop is long shuttered and he may be back with his Nonna in Palermo. In mounting desperation, I last week ordered a cordless professional hair-clipper from Amazon, which – like everything you order online these days – is making its way towards me at a most leisurely pace, though that may give me time to flog the tin of Allinson’s Dried Active Yeast I fell upon at the supermarket yesterday for £89.99 on the Dark Web.

I dimly remember that I am typically given a zero crop on the arid planes of my uppermost head – the surviving hairs there being of psychological value only – and a 0.5 crop on the rest.

It is probably best selfinflicted in the garden, with a mirror to jiggle and something to mop up the blood. human hair is said to deter much unwanted wildlife – like the two fat foxes we gazed upon in astonishment the other morning, sunning themselves on the neighbour’s lawn as if to the manor born.

BuT, if all this grinds on much longer, you do fear something might snap. In October 1918, still the deadliest month in American history, 195,000 people died in the influenza pandemic. As funeral homes ran out of coffins and horse-drawn deathcarts went about by night in the streets of Philadelphia, gathering corpses like a scene from the Black Death, social order came very close to collapse. One man cut the throats of his wife and four children, screaming: ‘I’ll cure them my own way.’

Another, a fishmonger, shot himself when he realised he had been infected. In San Francisco, panicked cops shot a man three times for refusing to don a facemask.

‘If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration,’ despaired Victor Vaughan, surgeon general of the uS army, ‘civilisation could easily disappear from the face of the earth…’ But, as mysteriously as it had arisen from the plains of Kansas, by the Armistice on November 11 the pandemic was already fading in the States.

As at least one commentator warned back in March, it is much easier to scare a country into lockdown than to cajole a shaken people back out of it. Yet, at some point – soon – emerge from it we must, with, one hopes, rather better attention to detail than this week has so far attested.

‘Do our leaders really not understand how people think or how they live?’ snapped a former colleague from england yesterday.

‘All I can say is you know that men are in charge when the golf clubs are open and the hairdressers closed.’