THE HORRORS OF A SOUTHEAST EUROPEAN TEN BOB HAIRCUT

“Ten bob haircut
Like the one before
Ten bob haircut
Short and very sore!” - Ritzen Ratzen Rotzer, Ten Bob Haircut

18/3/2021. I had to give myself a haircut today. It was a necessary evil – if I leave my hair too long, it grows (un)naturally into a Fozzie Bear wokka wokka cut, frightening children and animals, until I am chased out of town by (for some reason) screaming angry farmers waving pitchforks and lit torches. And there aren't even any farmers round these parts, so they must commute from the countryside to do it. A really retro dangerous Frankenstein scene, and plain undignified with it. So sometimes a chop of the old cranial follicle kudzu vine infestation is just in order.

And today was the fateful self-hairdressing day. Barberism begins at home, to paraphrase The Smiths. My hair tends to have two lengths: short or long, no in-betweens, because I just can't be bothered trimming it every few weeks. Leaving it until it embarrasses me, threatening to break my neck with its weight when I nod my head, is just the way I go. I'm a lazy bugger; will never make a Vidal Sassoon, so sue me.

Of course, nobody can go to a barber these days (they reopen on April 5^th, I hear), so everything has to be a home job. When the lockdown started last year and it got to a point where I started to look a bit Fozzyesque (I usually get my hair cut at a shop in the Falkirk town centre), I went to Asda in Grangemouth and Falkirk and tried buying myself a pair of clippers. Dunno why they're called a 'pair' – there's only one of them. Anyway, that's a side semantics point for another, less serious day. They didn't have any clippers, or hair clippers at least, cos there had been a run on them, with everybody having the exact same idea. Though I would have been sorted for beard clippers, as they had millions of them, for some reason. Wrong part of the head, and bottom-of-skull favouritism with it, the dirty insensitive bastirts!

I left Asda clucking and tutting in anger and sadness, cursing haircuts, beards, closed barber shops, Coldplay (cos you just have to) and, oh, eh, pandemics, just as an afterthought. But things worked out. My brother gave me an old pair of clippers he had bought when he was on holiday in Bulgaria a few years before, a spare set. You know, one of the ones where you have the special wee white adapter so you can plug it into a Scottish plug point. It did the job, though the first time I did it the thing didn't seem charged up enough and I had to keep charging it up halfway through, as it either didn't hold a charge too well, or I was not leaving it long enough on charge to work properly.

Cutting my hair in looking-better-incrementally installments was a bit nerve-wracking, wondering if I would ever finish, and I was glad I had had plenty of time to do it in. After all, if I had been on the run to go to work, having the damned thing cut out a few times as I was rushing out the door would have been beyond disheartening, each low grinding clicking farty buzz of fucked-battery rundown driving the spike of my own self-barbering stupidity in these matters deeper into my bleeding heart.

I had this previous failure in mind when I set out to cut my hair today. I work nights, and had woken up after a few hours of sleep. I nipped out and got something to eat at the corner shop, deciding I would cut my hair at midday, giving me plenty of time to charge up any battery if need be – I was that paranoid, though I had left it on for hours charging a couple of days before – then go back to sleep before getting up for work in a few hours.

Or that was the theory. Of course, in real life these days, nothing ever goes so smoothly. Keeps life interesting, and other cliches.

I got out the clippers and went into the bathroom, where it's easy to just sweep up forlorn shorn hair from the tiled floor. Eyeing my frightening uncropped top in preparation for the horror to come, I switched the clippers on and dug them into the middle of the hair at the middle of the front of my head. They started carving the hair away like wool from a lamb, or kebab grill meat from a rotating dead lamb skewer, and I nodded in vague satisfaction at the progress of the merciless scalp defoliation.

And then all of a sudden, under a thudding grinding skreeeing cruuuunnnnnccccch...the clippers stopped working. Just stopped dead. Silent. Motionless.

I sighed inwardly, having half-expected this turn of events, cos, well, as you yourself will know, gentle reader, there's always bloody something, nothing is ever simple, and, as the Manic Street Preachers put it (in a song nothing at all to do with haircuts), “nothing turns out like you want it to.” Figured. Just abso-fucking-lutely figured. Pulling the clippers away from my head, I switched them off and on again. They came back on, and I ran them through my hair. Which, contrary to what should have been happening, stayed the same length. I kept running them back and forth. Nothing, nada, zip, zero, rien, bugger all. I switched them off again and slipped the plastic length gauge off them.

These particular clippers only came with three lengths: shortish, short, and scorched earth policy, napper napalm. I had just been cutting my hair using the last setting. I looked at the metal clipping teeth like I knew what the fuck I was looking for and at. Few stray hairs in the gears that I pulled out. I figured my hair was of such manly hard Brillo pad strength that it might just have decimated the fussily clicking clacking clipper teeth as they went about their messy deforestation way, and felt oddly proud. Clicked the plastic gauge fitting back on, switched the clippers back on. Potentially functional hum and buzz and might-be ready to go.

Put them to my head, like a gun sadly lacking a trigger. Or a barrel. Or bullets.

Nothing!!!!

Not one single solitary hair on my head got savagely snipped. Joy. Valhalleluja, as Nanowar of Steel would put it. Now this supposedly simple head-pruning preening task was starting to grow arms and legs, if that makes sense. I started calculating hours left to sleep, methods to rectify the situation, whether to just lie down on the cold slightly hairy floor and weep bitter tears of hopeless grief. I briefly contemplated cutting my hair with a pair of scissors I have, but the chances of looking like an escaped mental patient after my self-mutilation were too high, so I decided against that option as a last resort.

After all, this was something I had to get rectified, and as soon as possible at that. I couldn't go into work looking like I had just invented a new inverted mohawk haircut under the influence of bath salts, but I still had to go in, couldn't just call off for such a ludicrous reason. Though I suppose looking like a punk extra from an 80s Troma film could be considered a family emergency, I didn't really want to test this theory out. I thought right, I'll look online at the Asda stock catalogue to see if they have clippers. Of course, I could not find out how to search bloody local store stocks, so I just thought right, I'll go to Grangemouth first, and if they don't have what I am looking for I'll go to Falkirk, then maybe try B&M, whatever it takes, scissors as a last resort.

I clamped a hat on my head and headed out the front door. I saw a female neighbour of mine sitting outside and nodded to her. She looked confused to see me again because, when I had gone out earlier to get something to eat, I had told her I was going to eat lunch and go back to bed for a few hours. Now here I was, out again, in lovely sunshine with a hat on my head. Some things are just beyond the ken of mere mortals, or merely confused neighbours. I jumped into the car and motorvated off to Grangemouth, leaving her to her dark musings and wonderings.

Mask on, sigh, into the shop. Asked a helpful woman where the clippers were, directed me round the corner. Examined the deforest selection, noting oh-thank-fuckly that they had three or four different kinds of hair clippers, and about 20-30 beard clipper varities. Bizarre, though I suppose testament to the popularity of feminised males feeling the need to appear masculine by covering half their fizzogs with a facial follicle forest. Let the beard-oil-guzzlers get on with their stinking willful perversity! Examined two different types of clippers, Hell-bent on buying two, with one as a replacement in case the first one melted down on me when I tried to use it. Noticed one box had been opened, took two of the same brand, bought them, got the Hell out of there. Had to say, though, working nightshift, I was quite enjoying being out into the lovely welcoming facekissy sunny afternoon, with the gorgeous change in the weather, despite all the bloody as-usual hassles. Things could have been way worse.

Got home. Saw my neighbour and showed her my head, laughing, making her laugh too. Always best to have a sense of humour about yourself, or you miss out on a lifetime's endless comedic material. She said she had wondered why I had a hat on. Now she knew my dirty heady wee secret. Went into my flat. Opened the box of one of the sets of clippers, making sure I had the receipt to take the other one back if I didn't need it. Looked breathlessly at the instructions:

“Before the appliance is used for the first time, it should be charged for 16-18 hours.”

A low demented damned sob escaped my pursed cursing lips. I didn't have that sort of time! Though I could have gotten up in a few hours after leaving them charging, but if I did that and they didn't work I wouldn't be able to work either, having left myself no time to cut what was left of my tragic frightening hair. I picked up the clippers and looked at them forlornly, tiredly, wishfully. Oiled the blades, as per instruction, nervously thumbing the on button. Please please please please please please PLEASE WORK!!!

Flicked the switch. Quiet low strong confident hum of clippers ready and willing and able to do their depilatory job, sounding strong, like Ash's chainsaw getting ready to go into battle with the Deadites. “HAIL HE WHO HAS COME FROM ASDA TO DELIVER US FROM THE TERRORS OF THE HAIRCUT!” (Paraphrased Evil Dead 3 quote, for anybody who thinks I just suffered a head trauma there, except for the one I'm discussing right now) Of course, Ash never cut his own hair with his chainsaw, would have only have been able to do that once, but he did whap the napper off a few Kandarian demons, so the weird analogy wasn't entirely baseless. I strode purposefully into the bathroom, confidence renewed, setting about my head in a clipping nipping trimming cutting frenzy, praying that the potentially minimal battery charge from the factory would get me through.

If it didn't, I could just unbox the other one and use it until it ran out too. Then back to Asda and buying more clippers, using them until I looked presentable for the general public, and employment purposes. I half-envisaged an endless parade of panicked car trips between home and Asda, buying a myriad of instantly-discarded battery-operated skullgrinders, an infinity of scattered receipts piled to the confused supermarket ceiling, eyebrow-raising staff wondering what the fuck I was doing and what drugs I was on, concerned security guards getting ready to rush me if things turned hairy.

In the end, it never came down to that, thankfully. I matched the gauges between the first set of clippers and the new ones. My hair got cut, turned out fine, I got to work, I was not chased with torches and pitchforks, I did not have to look like a mental hospital patient, I can take the second backup set of clippers back with the receipt. I suppose it does say something about my fatalistic view of life these days that I even considered a backup set necessary, but forearmed is foreshorn. Or something. Better safe than furry. And I suppose there is a moral here about the relative quality of Southeast European skull-shearing goods versus Asda scalp-saviours, but I'm damned if I can find it. Just go easy when it comes to home haircutting. These are trying, difficult times, and the shear stress that can be headed off simply by maintaining decent guillotine gear...is nothing to shake your head at. Now where did I put those nasal hair trimmers...?

Talk amongst yourselves.

END (FOR A WHILE)