Lock-down Hair

It's been a source of great relief across the nation that hairdressers have now been able to resume business, and it's been a source of great humour that so many of us grew "Lock-down Hair" while they weren't able to work. Of course, what was bound to happen, happened. After some time, people turned in desperation to friends and family to cut their hair for them. Many did it themselves, possibly because they didn't trust anyone else, or maybe because there was enough stress around already without the risk of falling out with their nearest and dearest because the resulting coiffure was so frightful. And thus the easily-recognised "Lock-down Haircut" was born.

I reported a few weeks ago that fellow sufferers amongst the staff at NT Upton House were displaying a notice at the entrance, "We'll forgive your lockdown haircuts if you forgive ours." In some cases, there was a lot to forgive, though the guys above were not amongst them.

One has to ask what kind of nutter would have lockdown hair when they were married to someone to whom the art of hair-cutting is not unknown, and who has been practising it fairly often for the past few decades. If one did ask that question, then I'm afraid the answer would be "my kind of nutter". My hair hasn't been this long since the seventies. That's fine. I quite like it like that. Grace is in the same situation, and hers looks lovely, but I think she'd be happy to have it trimmed. Her problem with that, though, is that I don't share her snippy skills, she doesn't fancy doing it herself, and she can't bring herself to go to a hairdresser yet.

If I need an excuse for going back to the hair-length of my student days - and I'm down to the same weight now as I was then, too - I think I've grown it from a sense of solidarity with other lockdown hair men. Grace and I have noticed a very common attitude of "we're in the same boat"ness amongst people over the past months. It's true in the marina (where, of course, we're not all in the same boat, but in quite similar ones, and all of us are wishing we'd been out cruising since February). We've experienced it in the National Trust gardens, where all of us are enjoying hours of wide open spaces and fresh air such as we'd not had for a long time, and we exchange greetings with strangers we would probably normally (remember 'normal'?) ignore; and it's been evident in the few shops we've been in, too, where there is patience and tolerance amongst customers, the like of which I can't remember before Covid. So I can catch the eye of another baby-boomer with passé hair-length, and we exchange a nod, and a grin of complete empathy that says, "Yeah, me, too!"

For the sake of posterity, I hope to remember to record in this blog when I finally give in and ask Grace to cut the mop.

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