My son, unlike his father, is a good-looking chap with a fine head of hair and a determination to appear at his best at all times. I suspect for him the inability to get a trim from his barber of choice, a Turkish establishment to which I’m pretty sure anyone over the age of 25 is refused entry, was the single most stressful aspect of a national lockdown.
A few weeks into Lockdown No 1 he could stand it no longer and asked me if I’d be willing to attempt a trim. I said I’d be delighted. Immediately suspecting he had just made a huge mistake, he insisted I first watch a YouTube video of some heavily tattooed and disturbingly muscular chap in Los Angeles doing something called ‘A Fade’.
‘Do you want to watch it again?’ my son asked when it ended. Stung, I gave him ‘The Baleful Glare’.
There was a time when The Baleful Glare was the nuclear option in my paternal arsenal: An unblinking stare, a raised eyebrow and a massive silence. Intimidating stuff. Once. Unfortunately, my son now does it as well, if not better than I do.
Anyway, I gave him The Baleful Glare. He whacked one right back. We stood, eyebrows poised, staring at one another for some time. Then I said, somewhat sniffily, ‘I think I’ve grasped the basic principles.’
We both thought we’d won.
The key, as my tattooed guru in LA had explained, a tad repetitively I thought, is to achieve an even and literally seamless transition from one blade setting to the next as you work your way up the head and through five different settings. All to do with a light touch, an even hand and a well-timed flick of the wrist apparently. What could be more straightforward?
As it turned out, quite a lot of things. My son laid out an old bedsheet on the kitchen floor and tucked another around his neck. He’d arranged an array of mirrors so he could view my efforts from every conceivable angle. A trifle over the top, I felt. The tension was palpable as I set about the task. To try and lighten the mood, I asked, as true barbers do, ‘So, booked your holidays yet?’
‘Let’s just stay focussed, shall we?’ was the riposte as another Baleful Glare bounced around from mirror to mirror. Trying to disguise the slight trembling of my hand, I began. He’d helpfully tied a string around his head at exactly the level where ‘the Fade’ should begin in earnest. The early stages went pretty well but as the razor approached that line and I changed blade settings the tension ramped back up. All this ‘light touch, even hand, flick of the wrist’ nonsense suddenly seemed a great deal more challenging than it had sounded. It didn’t help that every faltering move on my part could be witnessed from 360 degrees.
‘You alright?’ my son asked. ‘Course I’m alright,’ I snapped back. Never show weakness. ‘You?’
We attempted the Glare but suddenly the stakes seemed far too high for that. We both averted our glance. Considerably more of a challenge for him, given all those mirrors, than it was for me, I have to say.
‘Keep still,’ I said. ‘Stay focussed,’ he replied. Cheeky blighter. ‘Did you know the back of your head’s a very odd shape,’ I asked, as though in passing. His eyes flashed from mirror to mirror. I smiled quietly to myself.
I finished to my satisfaction and stood back as he scrutinised his head from every angle. Then he nodded this thanks, reached for the clippers and made an elaborate performance of tidying up and finishing off my work. I couldn’t help noticing whilst there was a lot of somewhat overdramatic wrist-flicking going on, not very much hair actually seemed to be getting cut.
A week or so later, my son mentioned that he’d run into his currently unemployed hairdresser moonlighting in the local Kebab shop.
‘Say anything about your hair?’ I asked nonchalantly. ‘Said it was pretty good,’ he replied, unpacking the take-away. ‘For a first attempt,’ he added quickly. ‘Well, that’s nice to hear...’
‘And an amateur.’ As I write this we are well into our third lockdown. Oddly, my son seems to have opted to wear a beanie hat pulled down over his ears whenever he appears in public. I have offered to repeat my triumph of ‘The Fade’, but he seems not to hear. Probably that hat…
Neil McCallum Twitter: @dawoodmccallum
*Writes as Dawood Ali McCallum. Author of five novels, Mrs A’s Indian Gentlemen* being the latest