My head has gone pear-shaped. As many of you may remember – and I struggle a bit myself sometimes; now, why did I come onto this page again? Oh yes – I have been cutting my own hair.
Mostly, it has been okay. There are odd tufts and bald patches but, seen from a distance of, say, a hundred yards, you wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. No more. Or so I thought.
I use a trimmer that has various settings: quarter-inch, half-inch, inch and various gradings in between. Alas, I couldn’t remember – yep, there it goes again – the setting for the sides of my heid, into which I got the idea that it was quarter-inch and fired away. Or was it an eighth? I can’t remember now.
Doesn’t matter. Result? Heid completely shaved to the bone. It was a disaster. I still had a decent amount on top, but it sat there like a pie. I hacked away a bit more at that but just made it worse, and so I was left with a cranium that cried out for sedation.
I tried rubbing stuff on the shaved bits in the hope of softening them or making the hair sprout back immediately. Nothing worked, not one vaguely viscous product from the bathroom cabinet: athlete’s foot cream, nasal spray, sunscreen, calamine lotion, Deep Heat.
Rubbish. So I tried the kitchen: cock-a-leekie soup, tomato purée, broon sauce. Same result: nothing. The soup was organic, so you’d have thought that would have helped.
I was due to have dinner at a friend’s house, so put a woolly hat on for the short walk to the car. As I arrived at her door, my host said merely: “Your hair looks different.”
The tone was almost approving. Then I remembered: modern women prefer men to look brutal. I will own that she tutted at some bald patches that I hadn’t noticed round the back. But, otherwise, she said it was okay.
But it was not okay. I was meeting mates in the pub before the football next day. Surely, they would titter? But, no, being men and not millennials, they never noticed a thing.
On the Monday, I’d a business meeting up town – ah, the executive life, you say; yep, the first such meeting in three or four years, it resulted in a net profit of one coffee and a cinnamon bun – but, again, no one laughed. Much.
And so it continued. No one was laughing at me. It was most extraordinary. Alas, as time went on, the bit on top edged towards the great crime – looking bouffant – and I noticed millennials tittering again.
Millennials, if you’re not in the groove, are young persons born in or around the year 2000 but, really, including the 1990s, and, while they profess “progressive” values, they’re really the most conservative generation, like, ever.
If your hair starts to resemble anything from the 1970s – the decade that gave them music at which they can only marvel – you see this little smirk form on their lips.
Well, to hell with them. Last of my worries. My heid is now at a crossroads. To cut or not to cut again? Tell you what: I’ll give it two or three months and make a decision then.
