Accidentally Kissing My Hairdresser

Understanding complex literature, sure. But social cues?

This story is for you, no matter how you feel about hairdressers. No matter how you feel about hair. It is not really about hair but human fallibility. The ability to behave like an idiot even when, in most areas of life, you are known for being capable and clever. Puppy-like, but in the name of a shared humanity, I roll over to expose my vulnerable underbelly. Shame is only shame when you bury it.

But let’s begin with hair. It will not surprise any of you who have seen me on impromptu Zoom calls or in real life that I am not one of those humans who spends a lot of time doing her hair. Waste of time, in my book. I want to run a quick brush through it and get on with something interesting. I’ll tie it up if I’m busy or wielding a power tool, but that’s it unless it’s my own wedding.

My sister once, seeing the sleek bob of an early US passport photo from my twenties that was among our dead father’s things, said ‘but you hair never looks like that’. ‘Like what?’ I said. ‘Neat,’ she said. When not in front of the camera (and sometimes even when I am), I am a dragged-through-the-hedge backwards kinda gal. Sure, I wash it, but I have no interest in styling it. Let it dry in the wind of my aspirations. I’d rather be writing.

US-passport corporate look vs hair reality at Amex interview, same month in 1986

But the years have taught me that if you want to live a wash-and-forget kind of life, you’d better get yourself a good haircut. And boy, has that been a ridiculous challenge. Seemingly, a lot of hairdressers don’t know how to cut my hair, even though when I look at it, it seems pretty basic. I think that’s the problem. It seems pretty basic. Long hair with a fringe (please never say the American word. I definitely wouldn’t have anything called “bangs”). Just give it a trim, right? Maybe with a light layer? Wrong. These are the cuts that look, the next morning, like you spent £60 purely having an inane conversation about holidays.

Then, thirty years ago, I found a man who could really cut it. This hair god (Matthew) was only 5 minutes down the road and trained in the Vidal Sassoon ‘precision cutting’ method. His cuts lasted for weeks; they looked effortlessly good without any nonsense required from me. What’s more, he loved reading. Instead of gnawing my brain to a stump with pointless small talk, we’d chat about books and other stuff that matters.

When he got married, he moved 20 miles down the road. Okay, no problem. Then I moved 20 miles in the other direction. Now we were 90 minutes apart, and the journey made a haircut plus highlights a full-day event.

I wasn’t the only person commuting for one of his haircuts; he had several London writers on his books. But it was a three-hour round trip by road and five hours by train and bicycle in the years I couldn’t afford to run one. For the set-and-forget hair person I am, it seemed a lot of trouble for a barnet. Yet I continued to see him a couple of times a year because whenever I had a punt on someone local, I’d regret it.

The pinnacle of these regretful trials was my February haircut this year. A woman with seemingly great credentials who now had health issues so only took two clients a day in her own home. It was an experience. She must have picked up on the fact I used to be in therapeutic practice because she subjected me to a five-hour trauma dump. Here’s an extract from the 1400+ words I had to write afterwards to decompress:

“Her mind was not on the job. The whole time she was doing the foils (painfully slowly), half the time her hands weren't doing anything at all. They were suspended in midair while she finished her sentence. Or they were gesticulating. I watched her hands in the mirror, over and over and again, doing absolutely nothing while she talked, distracted from the task in hand.”

Her full tragic life story is the ‘archives’ post in Sunday’s Secret Diary Club, and it is genuinely fascinating if you can read a condensed version in five minutes rather than be personally subjected to it for five hours. FIVE HOURS. Coming out of her place with an inadequate haircut and a brain full of her personality, the hairdresser search intensified. Never again, I thought, must I fuck up that badly.

So this is the context of the incoming mishap. A quarter century of fruitlessly searching for a decent haircut in the city of Brighton & Hove (population 290,000, surely most of them hairdressers). A search even more pressing since July 2021, when my genius hairdresser told me he was retiring and moving to France.

My final Matthew haircut.

And Reader, this Saturday, I found the Holy Grail Hairdresser. The new Matthew. Someone who can cut my hair as well as my former hair god and has sensitivity and a brain between their ears so they won’t destroy me with small talk (or indeed trauma-dump their life story).

I told him I was auditioning him, and he didn’t seem fazed. We discussed what was wrong with my last haircut (technically speaking). The vibe was perfect: a one-client salon with an open window overlooking the sunny pedestrian street where people sat having coffee in the sunshine and wandering into the vintage clothing shops, vegan cafes, and community art galleries as a busker played reggae. He cut my hair with attentiveness and skill while we talked about meaningful things, human to human. And at the end, when I looked in the mirror, finally, it was just like Matthew’s cut. I was near-overwhelmed with joy. I told him he’d got the job. We were both very happy. Did I want styling products, he asked me hopefully. Heat protection? I don’t use heat, I told him. I don’t style.

Three minutes later, I was out on the street, unlocking my bike, sending him a WhatsApp apology, hoping I could salvage the situation. I cycled home, feeling incredible about my hair and terrible about what I’d just done. Once home, I checked my messages: no reply. For the rest of the day, at random moments, I cried out in involuntary anguish as the memory surfaced. How, oh how, after 25 years of searching to replace the perfect hairdresser, could I have ruined it so quickly?

What did I do? I accidentally kissed him. Rather intimately. On his neck.

Neurodiversity is an interesting thing to navigate. Before I knew about my ADHD-wiring, I couldn’t understand how I could be so clever in specialist things and yet so exceptionally stupid in everyday stuff that other people found easy. For many years, I harboured a profound self-loathing as a result of my social ineptitude. Socially, I was a disaster: not listening when people were talking to me, interrupting, being late, completely forgetting to turn up, not responding to messages, speaking bluntly and without a filter (“missing the tact gene” as my sister used to say), and oh boy… not understanding social cues. I have learned to manage these ADHD traits to some degree, but they are all still hard-baked into this cookie, and at times, like Jurassic creatures from the ocean depths, they surface. Especially at times of high emotion.

So there’s me, in a state of pure joy, following my new hairdresser Chris – The One! At Last! – down the narrow stairs and outside into the even narrower passage so he can let me out of the gate. It is very narrow, this passage, so I have to get extremely close to squeeze past, and this is also our ‘goodbye’ moment and oh no! What’s the correct version? Suddenly, I have no idea. In this split second, I fail to correctly interpret the social cues. My high emotion plus confusing proximity has over-written any boring-arsed etiquette guidelines my logical brain might have provided. If these guidelines are filed somewhere (oh they are, and will surface in a few seconds to create my first wave of cringe), they are currently inaccessible.

Let’s be clear, no thinking was happening. This was an instinctive response in a split-second of confusion, in the face of signals I couldn’t read because of my joy and his proximity. Right at this moment, I absolutely love him. So before I know it, I am hugging him like an old friend, completely knowing this is the wrong move. And as though my body just wants to send me to hell, it has engaged the automatic old-friend programme ‘hug and kiss’, and the kiss has landed on his neck! He hasn’t even closed the gate behind me before I want to die.

But I keep my head. I say to myself, as I am unlocking my bike, ah, sweet child of ADHD, what the hell, you dear idiotic thing, nope, it’s okay, you’re forgiven, I will message him right away and apologise. So I do, hopeful that fessing up rather than pretending it didn’t happen will be enough to persuade him I am not some pervy cougar who has just committed a low-level sexual assault. I send the message, and it gets double-ticked, and that is that. No response.

I totally know you’re not supposed to kiss your hairdresser. It’s a professional relationship. But knowing isn’t enough to bypass the circuits when they are activated by panic. I once kissed a (female) work colleague in a similar moment, and now she always chooses a different train carriage from me on the commute. This goes in the same bucket as that time when, stressed by a social pothole at a prizegiving party, I asked the Guardian Books Editor something so inexcusably personal that her eyes filled with tears, and she left the room. And then the building. That bucket is pretty full.

I think of my dear friend, the poet Justin Coe, also ADHD, who was on the school bus as a teenager with the Victoria Sponge he’d baked in cookery lessons in a tin on his lap. Some bullies were picking on another boy at the front of the bus, and he spontaneously stood up and said ‘Hey!’ The bullies turned their predatory attention towards him, and in a panic, not knowing how to prevent the inevitable violence, he opened his tin, picked up his cake, and smashed it into his own face. The whole bus erupted into laughter, and that did the job. No need to beat anyone up if they’ve done it for you. Clowning: ever the perfect side-step from consequences.

If you care at all about my haircut quest and a redemption arc, I can deliver a happy ending. Chris got back to me after a couple of days. He thought he’d responded, then realised he hadn’t. Because, as we discussed when he was cutting my hair, he is also ADHD.

I know. Blah blah blah neurodiversity, all these people coming out of the woodwork like so many beetles, using their labels to claim specialness and most of them self-diagnosed… I’ve seen the complaints. But when you’ve lived most of your life wondering how you can be such a fuckwit (the word I used against myself most often) it’s genuinely enlightening to find There Is A Reason for your social ineptitude and it Isn’t Your Fault. The roots of ADHD appear to be in the womb, so I didn’t have a lot of say in it. With my neurones wired in that particular pattern from the outset, I don’t have any choice to not be ‘a fuckwit’. But I can, at last, stop using that word for myself and also for other people who may be neurodiverse (because, yes, there’s a lot of it about).

These ‘labels’ aren’t useful if they create a sense of victimhood (which self-defeating and disempowering state I do not encourage). But as tools of compassion, helping us build frameworks of understanding, they are powerful. Just the knowledge that neurodiversity exists, and is actually rather common, can help us to stop assuming the worst, always going straight to idiot and arsehole.

How refreshing to find a solid reason to stop condemning others and ourselves.

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Got any fun (or cringe) neurodiversity stories? Hairdresser tales? Other ordinary-yet-suprisingly-difficult quests? I love to hear from you, so …

Post-it Notes

This week I have

• Drawn several maps for my pirate novel

• Visited a Funeral Director for the first time

• Completed another non-fiction book proposal

• Sat in a wood-fired forest hot tub in the rain, gazing at a field of orange cows