Poland: send us your barbers!
I hate having my hair cut. I've been trimmed in Tokyo, sheared in Sheffield, and cropped in Kraków: it doesn't matter where I am, I find the experience alarming. There's something deeply unsettling about a complete stranger radically altering your appearance while you sit in a strangulating bib in a public place. I'd rather have my teeth extracted by a mechanic. I suspect most men feel like this, but there is no acceptable way of bringing the subject up over a pint so I can't be sure.
Przeczytaj felieton po polsku!
Zajrzyj do Jamiego.
I avoided having my hair cut in Poland for too long. I knew something had to be done when the chimney inspector referred to me as a makaroniarz. I was pleasantly surprised to discover there are some advantages to having your locks shorn in the land of the red-and-white flag. The greatest of these is that men's barbers still exist here. They are becoming increasingly rare in the UK; it's all 'hair salons' now. The moment you walk into a hair salon you become the kind of man who has a hairstyle rather than the kind of man who has hair cuts. This is all very well if you are a TV celebrity or a gigolo but I want no part of it.
I made the mistake of visiting a hair salon once. It's a scary world in there. The scariest part is that they expect you to have an answer to the question: "How would you like your hair?" I want to say: "Well… shorter," but the best I can usually manage is: "Errm…" I'm not comfortable in a place that expects me to know what 'layering' is; surely it's their job to know this stuff. I'd be a little shocked if the doctor asked me how alkaline I like my blood corpuscles. Hair is like a chronic illness to me: I want to walk in and have the symptoms treated as swiftly and painlessly as possible. Eventually I will go bald and be completely cured.
If you don't know the answers to hairdressers' questions they start suggesting things, which is even worse. I just said "Yes" to everything for fear of sounding ignorant. I came out looking like several different pages from a glossy style magazine. My wife couldn't recognise me from the left side. I bought a hat in the shop next door—I think they were working together.
After a couple of false starts I found a proper barber. It is staffed by fat men with moustaches who learned their trade on the scalps of a hundred thousands conscripts. Gel is not mentioned. At first, the barber assumed I had sophisticated tastes because I was foreign. He tried every trick he knew. At one point he combed the clippings out of my hair and showed them to me against a white napkin. I had no idea what to say, not to mention a complete lack of Polish vocabulary for commenting on very short pieces of hair.
Thankfully, my barber has given up these tricks and now treats me like anyone else. Every visit is shorter than the one before. I'm hoping that eventually the amount of time I have to spend in the chair will become negative; I will become well groomed simply by thinking about going there. We need more of these men in England. I plan to open a chain of barber shops in London staffed entirely by Poles who speak no English and will, therefore, be unable to ask you questions that you don't know the answers too. I will become so rich that I will be able to have my head seeded with robotic hair and give the remote control to my wife.
Jamie Stokes