NOTES FROM THE NEW NORMAL
What a weight off my shoulders. Or at least, off the top of my head. Because, at very long last, I’ve had a haircut. A mere five months since my last one.
The moment the Government announced the date that hairdressers could reopen, I made my booking.
I wasn’t especially bothered about the way I looked, preposterous though it was. It was more about the way I felt. My hair was uncomfortable. So thick and heavy and stiflingly warm. It was smothering my ears, and creeping down the back of my neck. Overrunning my head the way ivy can overrun a garden.
Anyway, it was lucky I did book so soon, because when I arrived at the hairdressers – just a small, inexpensive place near me, in Gravesend – the phone barely stopped ringing. Each time, the answer was the same: “Hello? No, I’m really sorry. Tuesday the 4th of August. That’s the earliest we can do…”
I’d brought a mask just in case, because I wasn’t quite sure what the new rules were. The hairdresser told me to wear it while she was washing my hair (because I would be leaning back, and so breathing in her direction), but not when she was cutting it (because I would be facing forwards, and so breathing away from her).
Otherwise, though, there were no big new rules to follow. A few weeks earlier I’d read a peculiar rumour that customers and hairdressers would be banned from chatting, but in fact we talked exactly as normal. Even if the hairdresser’s visor did make her voice sound slightly distant, as though she were calling from the next room.
As she scythed her way heroically across my scalp, I watched the enormous black clumps heaping up on my gown. It looked as if Dennis the Menace’s dog had curled up in my lap.
All the extra hair she’s having to cut at the moment, she should really be charging double.
Eventually she was done. I stared at my reflection. I’d grown so used to looking like a shipwrecked sailor, I barely recognised myself. My hair was so neat and prim and short. Like a schoolboy’s. Albeit a schoolboy with a beard the size of a gooseberry bush.
I loved it. Suddenly I felt so much cooler. Fresher. Cleaner. Lighter. Especially that. It was as if I’d just lost two stone. Somehow, the haircut seemed to have given me extra energy. I could have sprinted home. I wonder if this is how sheep feel just after they’ve been sheared.
It was fantastic. Invigorating. Weirdly liberating. A release, and a relief. I’d never felt like that, after a haircut.
Still, wonderful as it was, I wouldn’t want to wait another five months, just to feel that way again.
I watched enormous black clumps heaping up. It looked as if Dennis the Menace’s dog had curled up in my lap