I take three fistfuls of tap water and use them to moisten my ludicrous bulge of hair. I have been alone at this point for nearly a month—writing, or typing at least, in the waterlogged valleys of Wales—and my hair now resembles a sort of lush tumbleweed. As a hairstyle beneath which to lead the Life of the Mind, it is something I almost cannot rate too highly. Sections of it, when twiddled around a finger, have shown some promise as a stimulant to cogitation. And it converts automatically to a pillow during the frequent and sudden naps that litter the workday of the professional thinker. But as a hairstyle to talk to people from beneath—and I have been led to believe that there will be people arriving tomorrow at lunchtime, some of them possibly ladies—it will emphatically not do.
For what it’s worth, there is a barbershop in the nearest town, just a green half hour’s drive away over the hills. But it is not worth much, to be honest, for I have seen what they do to people in that place, and while I think I understand on some level why it is they feel they have to do it—the bleak categories of rural society would very quickly be disordered if people suddenly started looking attractive—that is not the same thing as wanting them to do it to me.
Fortunately though, the year is 2007, and an awesome power that just a decade ago I would have backed away from in holy terror, like a Neanderthal from a high-end propane grill in full flame, I calmly reach out and seize. That science and technology would endow me with godlike abilities was my faithful hope since boyhood. Yet I never dreamed of this, of wielding that one power God himself chooses not to exercise, at least according to visual depictions. Taking a belt of scotch, I meet my gaze in the mirror. And having met my own gaze, I do the once unthinkable: I cut my own hair.
The man who cuts his own hair, most serious civilizations have historically assumed, has a fool for a client. As far back as ancient Rome we find no less a figure than Martial, the father of the epigram, outing a rival as a self-haircutter and taunting him with a nasty Numquid tonsorem, Gargiliane, times? Si pudor est, desine. (Are you frightened of the barber, Gargilianus? If you have any shame, you’ll desist.) Harsh words, but ones that would with hindsight have served ably as the Latin motto of Western Culture. From antiquity through to the modern age, the figure of the self-haircutter has been loathed with a passion that defies easy explanation.
Until now, that is. A world in which after you’d finished cutting your own hair you might as well just go ask your sister out for cocktails, so far had you drifted from the main drag of civilized behavior, has become one in which George Clooney cuts his own hair, as does Catherine Zeta-Jones. How did it happen?
