Blood was 5.8 this morning, which is higher than I like.
My parents have a peculiar feature in the upstairs of their house. It’s a full-length mirror that runs the height of the wall opposite which you find yourself when you stumble out of bed, groggy and flapppy and dangly and before you’re altogether wise enough to cope with such an image. That happened to me this morning around 8ish. Stumbled out of bed, scratching myself, and went to pee, only to be confronted by the pale, naked wobbly truth of my still 17 and a half stoneness, getting bigger in the mirror with every step I took.
That’s the kind of thing that really puts a downer in your day.
Got up, and the idea was that I’d go get a haircut and a shave before inflicting my face on the innocent seaside.
Now, this is probably A Thing, and I seem, throughout the course of this experiment, to be leaving No Thing Unexplored, so here you go.
London is, of course, a massive metropolitan city. So why it’s so tricky to find a hairdresser that doesn’t make my bowels clench in terror or intimidation, I don’t know, but it is.
Living in Stratford, there are about three hairdressers within walking distance of our house, and I’ve gone to each of them over the years. There’s the fiercely-serious salon where, when I walked in, you got that air of the Western, when the innocent young cowpoke walks into the gunslinger’s saloon, and every eye turns to look at him. It would probably be fair to say that they didn’t expect to have to sully their creative gifts with the simple Yeti-shaving arts required by this white-boy. They did it, but with much sucking of teeth. I went back the second time just to prove the power of the customer, and the music was so loud that the barber ‘misheard’ my “I’d like a trim please” as “shave me bald so I look like a racist Sontaran penis-head please”. Which was an interesting look for a while...
The second hairdressers in the vicinity was an all-female establishment, run by mainly-white, mainly older women, who made me look like the pictures I have from junior school. It’s not easy, when you’re as bald as I am, so pull off a pudding-bowl fringe, and I have no illusions that I managed it.
The third hairdressers would be what you’d get if the first two (gods forbid) had a love-child – a serious hair emporium run by mainly young black women, which was like the serious male establishment, only with a salty level of ribaldry that floated above your endangered head like a fog of aggressive oestrogen.
So I tried a hairdresser in the city, and on Oxford Street, I found one that I could occasionally visit without getting tongue-tied and coming out looking like the aforementioned racist Sontaran (I’m not gonna spoon-feed you this image by the way – if you don’t know what a Sontaran is, please feel free to Google it).
But even my Oxford Street experience is dangerously hip, and barks questions at you over the music, and processes customers at an alarming rate – it’s kind of like a cross between a hairdressers and an abattoir.
So, I’ve taken to visiting a Merthyr barbers/hairdressers every time we’re in the town. I’m now known to quite a few of ‘the girls’ who work there, and there’s only the low buzz of a radio, meaning they engage you in the lost art of ‘general hairdressers’ chit-chat’. Now, I’ve never been one for chit-chat in the barbers’ chair, but there’s something so homely and familiar about the accent, I think, that in that place, I indulge, and it’s relaxing, rather than tiresome.
So off I toddled for my semi-regular appointment with the Cousin-It shavers. Oddly enough, throwing a little caution to the wind in the spirit of vacation, I told the girl to do what felt good.
Look at me, I’m a racist, probably bi-curious Sontaran...
But she redeemed herself utterly as I got up to pay and leave.
“Dewwww,” she said (which is actually Welsh for Godddd, but sounds more like genuine surprise and less like petulance than you’d expect). “You’ve lost a lot of weight, ‘aven’ew?”
I beamed.
“A bit,” I said, faking modesty.
“’ow much you lost now then?”
“’bout three stone,” I said, throwing modesty to the wind.
“Dewwwww,” she said, adding a ‘w’ in appreciation. “Tha’s marvellous. Whatch’ew doin’?”
“Absolutely buggerall, that’s the point,” I confided. “Nothing of any calorific pleasure-value whatsoever, plus walking, plus biking.”
“Welllll,” she said appreciatively. “Looks amazin’, fair play like...”
I gave her ten pounds for the six pound cut. She’d more than earned her money.
Shortly after my hairdressing adventure, we were off, heading to Amroth, the tiny, beautiful village that time forgot on the coast of Wales. Checked that the sea was still there. Then, a couple of hours later, checked again. It’s tragically boy-scout, I know, but looking at the sea never gets dull somehow.
My vacation-stomach appeared to kick in later in the evening though – my folks are staying the night, and the parade of dinner, and fruit, and nuts and crackers and cheese, and more nuts that filled the evening made me groan with memories of sensual pleasure and gluttony as we creaked our way up the stairs.
Tomorrow, dagnabbit, there will be walking!
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