Richard Baum

What is it about girls’ hair?

Last night I went leafleting. I timed the excursion to within thirty seconds of perfection, only being pelted by thunderous rain as I walked back to the car. The friend I was leafleting with was also subject to half a minute’s rain, and was transformed in these few moments from a calm, rational human being into a screaming, flapping animal which I can only assume took the wrong fork when man and beast made their evolutionary split some time ago.

Apparently her hair had got wet, leaving it vulnerable to “frizzing.” I am not exactly sure what frizzing means, but I suspect from the reaction that it is about a dozen steps up the pain meter from getting your leg pinned under a boulder and hacking it off with a pen-knife.

If her hair had caught fire, or been infested with bees, or inexplicably lit up like a beacon casting a shaft of light high into the sky above, I could have reasonably understood the reaction. But the flappy arms and the running and the screaming and, God help me, I’m sure there was weeping, did make me genuinely think I’d been momentarily distracted whilst she’d trod on a land mine.

This isn’t the first time that a girl’s hair has caused me confusion. I once dated a girl who’s reaction to even the fluffiest of white clouds punctuating a summer’s day was to leave the house armed with an umbrella the size of a three-man tent. Her idea of a sexy shower together consisted of donning a shower cap and watching the hose with a mixture of suspicion and cat-like readiness whilst I stood shivering in the corner wondering how hard it would be to drown myself.

Needless to say, the relationship ended before too long, and since then there has been an unwritten rule in my love life that says that the girl concerned can’t care more about the rigidity of her hair style than she does about me.

Friends of mine are content to walk through the streets holding umbrellas above their heads when conditions are bone dry. I am not entirely without doubt that some of them put their hoods up indoors, just in case. One girl I know spends day after day inspecting her hair for split ends, a condition so spectacularly undetectable to the naked eye that she may as well worry that there’s a hydrogen atom on display on the top of her head. She is, by definition, worried about something half the width of a single human hair…

I couldn’t care less about my hair. It grows, I get it cut, and it grows back. It is a simple equation and one which I am entirely comfortable with. I see no reason to complicate the picture with anything produced by L’Oreal.

There is a billion-pound industry in male grooming products that I proudly contribute not a single brass penny to. As long as it’s clean I don’t give it a moment’s thought, and despite having a succession of barbers try to palm off their crazy gels on me, I have resisted so far, and lived to tell the tale.

Yesterday I got it cut. Five pounds, thank you very much. Girls I know spend, literally, hundreds of pounds a year on their haircuts. They go to Toni and Guy. I go to some guy called Tony. I simply don’t understand why they do it. Is there some scissor technique I don’t know about? Is there a hidden artistry in the blades that I don’t get from my “number three at the back and sides?” Do they worry that sacrificing glamorous salon for high street barber-shack will mean running the risk of having their ears scissored off by some barely-trained amateur? 

When I was at university, and even a fiver was too much to pay for a haircut, I went to a “hair dressing academy,” where it was free so long as you let a trainee do it under supervision. The experience was simply the most laborious four hours of my life, punctuated every ten minutes by a single snip, each one followed by discussions and feedback from an instructor. The whole process was like trying to start a fire by putting a plank of wood near a radiator.

But even then, the hair got cut (eventually), and I survived.

I just don’t see the fuss. I look at myself in the mirror, and there aren’t any clumps falling out or bits flying off at crazy angles that make me look like a scarecrow. There are no matted wedges that mark me out as a madman, and I’m not constantly attended to by a bunch of swarming flies. So I spend a tenner a year, and they spend hundreds a year, and the results are the same… One of us is missing something somewhere, and I hope to God it isn’t me. 

It might fall out one day. I am told that baldness follows on from the maternal grandfather. My one of those lived to 83 and had a full head of hair until the end. But ,on the other hand, it might follow on down the male side, and my Dad makes Bobby Charlton look like Peter Stringfellow.

Either way, I suppose I don’t care. It’s hair. It’s there. Deal with it.

Rick