Jonathan Meades
Shaved heads, closed minds
Milord sumption became Prey of the Month because he failed to heed The Mob’s indolent unwillingness to read the small print. It eschews nuance. Its dicta are not mitigated by qualification. It is keenly Manichean.
It is also a finger-pointing fishwife who disapproves of Milord’s farouche hairdo and spits a scornful “you must be joking” in response to an amended tabloid question of 60 years ago: “Would you let your daughter marry a former Supreme Court judge?”
The Rolling Stones’ hair was an advertisement for their cosmetic “rebellion” as they made their first cuban-heeled steps in showbiz. Milord’s splendid baroque confection of wings, scrolls, pediments, putti, rustication and gesticulating saints topped by a hive woven of
barbe à papa is an advertisement for rebellion of a more profound and necessary sort, for free-spiritedness and a willingness to diverge far from la pensée
unique. When he describes the current parliament as emasculated and a travesty he should be listened to.
Long hair means something it didn’t in 1964. Long hair is, today, regarded by The Mob as culturally ’litist, not to be copied. It is attached to artists such as Simon Rattle and Mischa Maisky, Stephen Calloway and the late Will Alsop. Jeremy Paxman’s newly freeflowing locks make me think of Alec Clifton-Taylor auditioning for The Killing of
Sister George. An improbable dream. When long hair had become a sign of subcultural conformity in the very late Sixties Christopher Gibbs was bruited in fashion magazines as the “first man to get short hair” and, sure enough in Tangier in the summer of 1970 he was Rupert Brooke in a djellaba. Which may of course have been what he hoped to be.
The people’s hair, 2021, is short, monosyllabic, brusque going on non-existent, hideously ugly, explicitly brutal and very worrying.
Do these men and boys whose heads are shaved up to three inches above the top of their ears not know that they are wearing the unterschnitt prescribed by every Nazi organisation? Given that the only history they appear to be taught is that of the first half of the twentieth century, they are either not paying attention, wanting in observation and witlessly taking as their role-supermodels such mass murderers as Heydrich and Kramer; or are they are merely copying footballers whose popularity and “influence” is probably as great as that of rock and rollers back in the day when — another fashion note — no one said “back in the day”?
when he was chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, Alan Sugar remarked that were the players not players they would be in prison. That was ten years ago. Today the multiply-tattooed Balkan war criminal look is popular and the only Premier League footballers with proper haircuts are Marcos Alonso and Patrick Bamford, the latter presumed by French commentators to be a member of the aristocracy because of a distant cousinage with Milord Bamford whose earthmovers dump millions in Tory coffers. “Short Jack And Sides” was so commonly requested in Brum barbers when the prodigy Jack Grealish first appeared at Aston Villa a few years ago that its victims’ photos were pasted in their windows. It’s all too easy to understand why small boys and girls might want to aspire to his extraordinary sleight of foot. But the hair! What is the matter with them? Theo Walcott is a courteous young man — box to box, wife, two kiddiz. On his head he wears a sheaf of unidentifiable vegetable matter or a cottage loaf placed by a prankster which no one has dared tell him about. Has anyone suggested to the countless players sporting a Croydon Facelift that they should leave that style to a little mystery with a kiddie in a buggy and another on the way? And what of the ultra-short carpets with lines drawn in them?
And what especially of the entirely shaven head which does not connect with the beard, a show of solidarity with Muslim teammates who are of course minoritarian victims: team spirit is merely the mob in miniature.
Christian Estrosi, mayor of Nice, has attempted without success to prohibit Muslim players from praying when they come on to a pitch or score a goal. The form is that they stare hard at their hands whilst muttering. These actions will have no effect on the result of the match. No matter, it is a small step towards the Islamisation of France, towards the normalisation of publicly expressed superstitions, towards the conversion of gullible, poorly educated young men.
When England played Germany in 1938 the team infamously gave the Nazi salute. Prayer on the sacred turf of Anfield or the preposterously named Theatre of Dreams is less brazen, more insidious.
It is to be hoped that the new law on separatism and the strengthening of laïcité which is before l’Assemblée Nationale will address this creeping infraction. Opposition to its supposedly anti-minority proposals has predictably incited The Mob.fr to take to the streets. Equally predictably the minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, claims that the law is not specifically targeting Islam.
And, as day follows night, representatives of other congregations join together to express solidarity with Islam, whining that to censure one religion is to censure all religions and the silly hairdos of the orthodox. This is wrongheaded, self-denying, appeasing. It is special pleading which demands exemptions for the systematically deluded. Whilst it might observe brotherhood and freedom it is wilfully oblivious to equality.
Today the multiplytattooed Balkan war criminal look is popular