Shorn

Once upon a time I had long luxurious flowing hair, so long that I could easily pull it into a pony-tail, well when I say easily there was a lot of scraping of the brush and gathering up of unruly hair and when I say pony-tail it wasn’t any more that 2 inches long but it was a pony-tail to me!

I got bored with all that hair after a while and reverted back to the default haircut, the floppy fringed Hugh Grant style that was visible from the age of 15 to the age of 26, quite a long time to have the one hairstyle but despite the ponytail incident, I was fairly happy with the look.

At the back of my mind was always a nagging thought, it spoke of razors and sheep-shearing, it spoke of dramatic gestures, it spoke of shock and awe, it was a path never taken, a dark scary path, it was the path of the shaved head….

While I was in college I was always curious about the people who had their heads shaved for charity during Rag Week, deep down I always wanted to try it, it see what I looked like but I was too scared, what if I had a weirdly shaped head, what if I looked like a drug addict (shaving some people’s heads seems to have this effect) or a psycho army nut? And then the torture of waiting for the hair to grow back again, the annoyance of “in-between hair”, looking awful for months, it seemed like a bit of a leap into an abyss.

And so at the ripe old age of 26 I found myself living on the other side of the world far from friends and family and the idea began to percolate in my mind once more…

If I shaved my head there, no-one would see the possibly dire consequences - well apart my friends there and my workmates but practically no-one, and of course the 4 million other people who lived in the city but besides all that, no-one would see….

What’s more, I’d have plenty of time to grow it all back.

Firmly entwined with these thoughts was the acceptance that there wasn’t as much hair on my head as there once was, perhaps shorter was better…

And so it was that one day I found myself buying hair clippers, later staring into the mirror with said hairclippers in hand trying to find the courage to switch it on, to make that first gesture, that first sweep of the clippers, the one that means no going back.

It took a while to take that first step. I started with the longest setting, I was brave but not that brave. The weird bit was that I actually looked balder afterwards that I did before, not quite the look I’d been hoping for, with a quick change of setting, I was off buzzing again, and again, and again until there was no more left, not even fuzz…