Following my recent dental extraction, I haven’t quite been feeling in the pink. So what better way of boosting your self-image – life has taught me – than to go and get your hair cut?
Life taught me this lesson the hard way. I remember my first visit to a barber back in ’59 or ’60. My dear paternal grandmother took me to Bentalls department store in Kingston upon Thames. I made an extraordinary fuss when called to sit down in the chair. My grandmother must have wondered what on earth had got into her normally placid grandson. She bought me a copy of The Eagle to help me get over the evident trauma.
During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s at school, the mere mention of the word haircut was guaranteed to strike fear into my heart. Long hair was a statement of youthful disaffection and I endured all manner of indignity to keep my hair as long as I could possibly manage it. Hair inspections at school were a time of calamity. My fellow rebels and I learned to stretch our necks like giraffes as prefects wandered amongst us, looking for signs of hair-on-collar. Sometimes I escaped the tap on the shoulder, sometimes I didn’t. Poor Puff Gardner never did. ‘Why me?’ he would complain bitterly to anyone who would listen.
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| Alf and Daisy seem to prefer me with shorter hair |
If only I had known then what I know today. How easy it is to submit to the scissors. How liberating it feels to shed unnecessary hair. How good it makes you feel about yourself for the next few days. It’s like buying a new pair of shoes: you surreptitiously try to catch sight of your reflection in every pane of glass you pass until you grow blasé about your new profile.
So I phoned up Franck in Brive and he managed to squeeze me in on Wednesday morning at 10.00 a.m. – which was perfect, because I could get the shopping done and park the car and even, with a superhuman effort, take the books and CDs back to the central library before the rendezvous.
Franck is no ordinary barber, not even an ordinary hairdresser. He is the only bio coiffeur in Brive. How many towns in the world can boast their very own organic hairdresser? I go there because he does the girls’ hair in return for my wife’s services (as an aromatherapy masseuse). Debs persuaded me that he would do a better job than Jo-Jo Publique by the roundabout in Martel. She wasn’t wrong. I’ve entrusted my scalp to Franck and his super-sharp scissors and cutthroat razor for over two years – and not regretted a single moment.
Franck is a pupil of a tonsorial mentor who goes by the unlikely name of Remy Portrait. Based in Paris, Remy writes books about his philosophy of ‘show me the follicles and I’ll show you the (wo)man’. Franck has been through a long list of courses with Monsieur Portrait and is licensed to employ a kind of friction-cut, which costs un bras et une jambe. I opt for something more traditional and much less expensive.
He, Franck, has a tastefully appointed salon down a side street just off the rue Gambetta, a stone’s throw from the family’s favourite tea & coffee emporium. It’s all soft lighting and ambient music. Very restful. The jeune sits you down in a very uncomfortable chair that tries to massage your back while your head is thrust backwards, so she can wash your hair while whispering sweet nothings about the temperature of the water. ‘Oui, c’est bon merci.’
Then she ushers you into the main room and sits you down in a conventional chair in front of an unforgiving mirror that highlights every wrinkle on your face. Franck drapes a thick rubber jerkin-thing over your shoulders, which seems heavy enough to keep out X-rays, let alone falling hair. Then he gets to work, snipping and fussing as we discuss families and common likes and dislikes. This time he told me all about a winter in 1985 when he lived in a flat in Pimlico and worked as a waiter in a French restaurant near Sloane Square. He told me that his mother came to see him and he booked her into a small hotel on the square itself, and how she woke up one Saturday morning to the edifying sight of the traditional punks’ parade.
At the end of the session, he brings the traditional rear-view mirror, which he opens with an ex-waiter’s flourish to reveal my new improved neckline. I nod my approval and give him the thumbs-up. He retrieves my bag and helps me into my jacket. I slip him the customary €21 and drop some change into the tin for the jeune who washed my hair.
Being a stingy git about such things, it’s more than I would normally pay for the privilege, but I go out of there with a spring in my step and a smile on my face, feeling roughly like a million euros. It’s worth it. For one thing, it means that I won’t wake up every morning (until my hair gets to a ‘certain length’) with an eagle’s ear: that irritating lock of hair that ruins my silhouette by sticking out at a right angle from my sconce.
So let us now please bow our heads for a moment in praise of bio coiffeurs everywhere.
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