The Shabbyman's Fear of the Haircut

The Twenty-First of June Two Thousand and Eleven. Tuesday.

Yes, it's Midsummer's Day. You won't get any of that voodoo hoohah round here, mind. Move along...

The more I think about it (Am I going mad or did the word 'think' escape your lips? Oh, that was just an obligatory TPB quote but I'm suddenly very struck with the phrase 'escape your lips'. Merci, Monsieur Goldman), the more the windmill seems an appropriate metaphor type thing. For today the sails seem to be rising - yea, they have fallen of late, and will do so again. But for now Mr Mood is on the up and up.

Partly this is due to payday being T minus 3 and counting away, but it is also down to the extremely scientific process of having all your bad ju-ju moved into your hair and then - having it cut off!

Ah, haircuts. Like taxis, I make use of them on infrequent occasions but don't quite feel comfortable with the processes involved. As a boy, my mother maintained the pudding bowl Purdeyesque perfection of my coif. My first paid for haircut came much, much later. Must have been late teens, at the barbers in the corn exchange in Manchester. I kept it fairly short around that time, getting into my early 20s. Then there was a particularly hairy phase inspired by my friend Andrew Fachau, where I let it get Francis Rossi long. Do you know, I'm not sure when the first beard came along. Must have been around then. Occasional fairly neat crops. Romantic poet longish for my first wedding. And then...

Oh man. There comes a time when every testerone-fuelled man has to face the abominable truth. Yes, everywhere else on your body is getting more unnecessarily hairy on a daily basis, but the top of your head..?

I call it my satellite dish. And despite what multi-millionaire footballing sophisticate W Rooney esq may think, there's no point trying to cover up ye olde male pattern baldness. Short's the answer - embrace that receding hairline and bald patch (although I hate it getting sunburned as I can rarely find a hat big enough for my huge potato of a head)

Of course, if you're a top comics writer/magician/greatest living Scotsman then the way forward is the shaven head look

(That's Grant Morrison for the less geeky types out there. Big fan of the man - so much so that when I got him to sign a book of his short stories I had to go back and ask him to put my name on there 'cos I was so nervous I forgot to ask him to dedicate it to me :-) )

I've only ever gone for the shaved look once, when No 1 son had the headlice over to stay and so me and him just got rid of it all. And perhaps it was around then that I had the idea of - symbolically, at least - putting all the fear, doubt and general crapulence of the moment into the shaggiest parts of my coat and then shearing it off. Usually it's every  month or two when my beard is at its Norwegian Fisherman best, but nowadays I also have regular scalpings thanks to my acquaintance with Brian Tavener, in my opinion Scarborough's finest tonsor, if only for the fact that he has railway magazines for you to read while you're waiting to be seated. A grade no2 all over usually does the trick.

In fact, in happier times my first wife, the inimitable Shu-Shu would wield the clippers for me. Indeed, she came to my rescue last year when, intending to go on my first date in an aeon I had visited a hairdresser that was new to me and had ended up with a nightmare barnet bordering on a mullet. That was not what was needed on what was already a particularly nerve-wracking occasion so, like an editor doing away with the author's worst excesses, she trimmed me down to size. Fortunately the photo I sent ahead to warn the woman I was meeting didn't put her off. No, it was my foul behaviour some months later that managed that.

Which neatly brings me to today (and brings me to today, neatly). The last few months of wear and tear have been cut away with my whiskers and tatty fringe. Tomorrow's looking a lot more clear cut.

More soonliest.