Mad hair day

We’ve all been here before. Hairdressers have been closed for months again which means our collective locks are once more well and truly out of control.

Boris Johnson has been in his element. His absurd blond tresses suddenly appear relatively normal and he can go about his business with his mad hair worn like a badge of honour to prove he’s one of us.

 

Brian has adopted the look of a crackpot professor, whereas I’ve regained my rat-peering-out-of-a-bush persona from Lockdown One.

 

Some people have been cheating. There were reports of people crossing national borders to circumnavigate the ban, while others have been sneaking off to rogue coiffeurs for Illegal Haircuts. You know who you are. 

 

Most of these transgressions went unpunished. After all, do the police really have time to caution people for having unacceptably coiffed hair? And in any case, illegal haircuts are hard to prove. Who’s to say the person in question hasn’t trimmed their own hair with the aid of a pair of eBay scissors and a Google tutorial? Or maybe they’re lucky enough to be locked down with a hairdresser.

 

One guy in the news headed across the border to Wales where hairdressers opened early, but was stopped for speeding on the way. I’m not sure why he was in such a hurry – perhaps his hair was growing unacceptably quickly, and he was trying to outpace it? 

 

Then there was the story of Ellis Genge - the English rugby player who bizarrely showed up for the Six Nations tournament in a dyed blond crewcut. Apparently a team member had convinced him he used to work for Toni and Guy and could conjure up a snazzy new style. What did Ellis have to lose, after all? It wasn’t as though he were about to play a macho sport on national TV or anything.

 

The youngsters are the lucky ones. They can pull off a blond buzzcut or a pink Mohican with panache. But for us oldies there’s no hiding place for our bald spots, dry ends or grey roots. On the upside, though, no-one was looking at us anyway.

 

Hairdressers finally reopened today and my own coiffeuse has booked us in for next week. Remember when it used to be the other way around? Now it’s a case of “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” and we’re pathetically grateful for a highly inconvenient time slot to suit the coiffeuse.

 

So with just over a week left to go, let’s hope that this particular rat can manage to find its way out of the bush when the time comes.