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.
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.
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?
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