The weather having been most satisfactory hereabouts for a number of days, with heat being supplied in reasonably copious amounts to head and body, and with said head and body subjected to a measure of perspiration at awkward times and in awkward places, I decided it was time for me to have a haircut. With my access to the Manic Street Barber’s being cut off by my irregular appearances at the place of my birth, I had to look for a hairdresser nearer home, to whit, on the High Street.
Situated in a poky little shop next to a betting emporium, I found what I took to be the most appropriate place. There was only a silver-haired old man in the chair and a young blond toddler waiting with his mother. I sat down. Twenty minutes later, the hairdresser, a septuagenarian male with a complete absence of hair himself, and horn-rimmed spectacles with lenses so thick they might have been fashioned from the glass you used to see embedded in pavements over a gent’s urinal, dismissed the silvery pensioner, and turned his attention to the little curly blond head of the toddler. To get the child up high enough to enable him to start snipping, he picked up an artefact from the back of the shop and propped it on the arms of the barber’s chair, which itself looked to be a relic from Sweeney Todd’s establishment. The artefact had started life as a kitchen chair, from which the back had been sawn off and screwed to a plank. It was the plank end that perched on the barber’s chair. The hairdresser and the child’s mother then engaged in a two-way conversation of such startling inanity that I could feel myself dozing off as the hot sun beat through the tiny, dirty window of the shop. This conversation lasted twenty-five minutes, and when the hairdresser had finished, the toddler’s Little Lord Fauntleroy curls looked exactly the same as before.
At last, it was my turn. I decided that taciturnity was the order of the day, but that didn’t matter, for the hairdresser needed no input from me.
‘Have you tried the Polish barber down the street?’ I shook my head.
‘He puts them in without any training. They’re not qualified. He shouldn’t be charging full price.’ He brandished his electric clipper, but didn’t get as far as applying it to my neck.
‘All this global warming,’ he said, ‘It’s nonsense. Mother Nature will deal with us when she’s ready. We’ll be wiped out like dust on the moon. That’s what happened to the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Pompeians, the Goths and the Visigoths.’
The radio announced the midday news. I had entered the salon at ten-past eleven. I could feel myself clutching the edges of the armrests.
'Did you know that Scotland was once part of Canada?' he asked. 'A bit just broke off and floated over here.'
A man in a green rugby shirt and an armful of vacuous tattoos entered the shop and sat down. He picked up 'The Sun' newspaper and turned to page three.
'Of course Britain was once part of Europe. The English Channel used to be a German river,' the barber added.
I raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment.
'Millions of years ago, Scotland had two gigantic active volcanoes', he said.
'One was Arthur’s Seat, the other was somewhere up north, near the Great Glen. Then they blew up with a great ‘whoosh’ – ten times worse than a nuclear explosion. You can see all that was left – they used to be 15 miles in circumference.'
He picked up a comb and swept it round to demonstrate the enormous size of a live volcano. He put the comb back down again.
'Scotland’s rocks are the oldest in the world,' he said.
'Take the Rockies, for instance. They’re new. If Scotland’s rocks were the grandfather, the Rockies would be the great-grandchild. They used to be the same size, but Scotland’s mountains have been ground down whilst the Rockies are still growing – ten inches a year.’
I was going to ask who applied the tape measure, but didn’t bother.
'Dinosaurs and mastodons used to roam Scotland,' he said. 'And hunter/gatherers used to kill the mastodons for food. A Norwegian palaeontologist found a mastodon thigh bone with a flint arrow-head buried deep in it. That proves it – hunter/gatherers roamed freely round Scotland 30,000 years ago. Somewhere near Inverness, it was.' He lifted a cut-throat razor to trim the back of my neck, but then let it fall back into place.
'I read somewhere that the North Sea is full of dinosaur bones. The fishermen keep bringing them up in their nets. There’s a chap in Esbjerg got three warehouses full of them. The fishermen know he collects them so they give the bones to him.'
Every now and then, as if he were attending to Samson, he cut off a lock of my hair.
I looked at my watch. It was twenty to one.
Eventually, after what seemed an eternity, he declared himself satisfied with the outcome.
'Pity I can’t do much with that cow's-lick’ he said, and swept away the sheet that had covered my shoulders. 'That’ll be £9.'
I reflected bitterly, as I walked out into the brilliant light, that, if I continued going there, I would eventually have greater knowledge than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but, long before then, the stress of attending would make me tear my hair out, so there would be nothing left for him to cut.
