Hair
today.........shorn tomorrow !
I use an old fashioned barber. The short back
and sides man familiar in the postwar years and probably thought to be extinct
today. He’s older than me and should have retired at least ten years ago.
Whether he keeps going as a social service or just needs the cash I don’t know
but it does spare his elderly clientele the agony of having to go into a trendy
unisex salon and explain to a limp handed youth that all you want is for your
hair to be cut like its always been cut with no questions asked. And of course
while you wait your turn sitting on tattered bench sparsely provided with one
or two ancient copies of The Readers Digest which anyway were there last time
you can turn your mind to the eternal verities of life the universe and
everything in the relative peace of a gentle snip snip as the shorn hair
soundlessly falls to the floor.
The barber works alone and the floor is
generally covered with fallen hair. He must clear up at some point, but I
wouldn’t guarantee that it happens everyday. But the sight of all that hair
got me thinking. I wondered how long it would be if it was all joined up end to
end. A ball park figure maybe ? Well suppose that there’s 100,000 hairs on one
head and he cuts an average of 1cm off all round. That would give 1 Km, quite
respectable length. Amazing really. And then there’s all that other body hair
only some of which is trimmed but it’s all there growing. Suppose all a
persons hair was condensed into a single hair, how fast would that single hair
be growing ? Again a ball park figure, but suppose a person has a total of
1,000,000 hairs and they’re growing at 0.1 mm a day, that would be 100 m per
day for the joined up single strand. So now I’m well into the realm of fantasy
and imagining now that all the hair of everyone in the world is joined up into
the single strand. How fast is that growing. Well again a ball park figure, but
it’s something like 5 billion times 100 m per day. Give or take that there’s
about 100,000 seconds in a day, that means the strand of all human hair is
growing at about 5,000 Km/second. Not as fast as the speed of light but fast
enough to reach the sun in say 8 hrs. That’s pretty fast. And now I imagine
that this has been going on for all human history say 5,000,000 years. Where
would the end of the strand be now ? Well it could certainly have wound round
our galaxy once or twice and be well on the way to one of our nearest
neighbouring galaxies. That’s a long piece of hair, and the universe is a big
place as they say!
My musings are interrupted by becoming aware
that the barber is telling one of his old stories to his captive in the chair,
and not only incidentally to the row of old men sitting on the bench. It’s an
old one that I have heard a few times already.
“
I was cutting this man’s hair “, I heard him say,
“ and I thought that he was very quiet. Some
men are like that. So I finished cutting. Shaved the back of his neck, dusted
the fluff off his collar, and the held the mirror so he could see the back of
his head”.
Everyone on the bench lifted their heads from
the Readers Digest or the Sporting Chronicle, or in my case from the floor where
I had been lost in thought while intensively studying the hair cuttings on the
floor, and we waited for the punch line.
“
I said, is that all right ? But he didn’t move “.
The barber stood back to admire his handiwork
and give time for his audience to appreciate the point and waited for a
response. There was always someone who hadn’t heard it before.
“
What did you do ? “, volunteered a less experienced bench sitter.
The
barber was now in control and had a victim that he could take the full distance.
“
Well I went round the front” he
said seriously,
“
and he still didn’t move, “ So I touched him and
held the mirror up in front of his mouth and he wasn’t breathing. He
was dead “ he said gravely
“
Sitting right there, and I had just cut his hair without noticing “.
Another
slight pause while the victim absorbed this latest development.
“ so what did you do ? “
The barber who had just shaved the neck of his
client, raised the razor and said
“
I phoned 999 of course”.
Another
slight pause for the drama of the moment,
“
But they wouldn’t believe me. I
couldn’t get them to believe that I had a dead man in this chair and I had
just cut his hair. “
“ But “ said the victim “ It could happen
and what did you do ? “
“ well I said I was quite serious and that it
wasn’t a joke, but nothing I could say made any difference and they wouldn’t
do anything except warn me not to waste police time”
“ So what did you do ? “
The victim had swallowed the hook and it was now
time to haul him in.
“ well I wheeled the chair
over into the corner over there “
he
said pointing to the curtained off area of the shop,
“
and I covered him with a sheet “
another dramatic pause.
“
Hair is funny stuff you know, it goes on growing after you’re dead. So I kept
him for my apprentice to
practice on ! “
Eyes returned to the papers. Barbers may be
subject to strange thoughts while wielding a cutthroat razor over the back of
your neck. My eyes returned to the floor and the slightly more abundant
sprinkling of hair.
Yes, hair is funny stuff. It seems to have no
real practical function. Yet it takes up so much time. I speculate on how much
time and effort it takes up with the human race.
Clearly there are differences between men and
women, and besides the hair on the head there
is the matter of removing it from various other parts of the body. I gave up
shaving my face many years ago because it seemed an absurd waste of time to
carefully cut the hair off and then wait another day for it to grow about a
fiftieth of an inch and carefully cut it off again. It saved me perhaps 10
minutes a day which I translated into a working week in each year, or over a
lifetime a whole working year saved. So just as a cautious ball park estimate I
assumed 5 minutes a day for males and 15 minutes a day
for females over the world population. Roughly that’s 300,000 working
years per year. Probably of the same order of the effort it took to build the
pyramids in ancient Egypt, but we could do it every year ! My mind was now
picturing pyramids in every town. An image soon shattered however by being
called to the chair for my own tonsure.
We have been in this barber- client relationship
for so many years now that I simply sit down and let him do his job, and
strangely enough he usually talks to me about violins. The connection between
barbers and violins might seem a little remote. But as he reminds me it’s the
unique properties of hair that make the violin possible. Otherwise it would be a
plucked or strummed instrument like a banjo.
“
When I was in London. “ he said,
“ I used to cut the hair of several musicians,
but this man was a violinist and when I cut his hair I had to put a clean sheet
on the floor to collect his hair clippings. Then afterwards I had to gather it
up a give to him in an envelope. He always gave me a good tip, this was after
the war and he was a foreigner, I think he was Hungarian. Anyway this went on
for a long time and once when the shop was quiet I asked him what he did with
it.”
The
dramatic pause came just as the barber was changing from scissors to his
electric razor for the back and sides of my neck.
“
He then told me a lot about the secrets of Stradivarius -
“
it’s not in the instrument “ , he said ,
“ It’s in the player. As the instrument is
played it absorbs the essence of the player, that’s why the Strads are so
good, they’ve been played by so many great players. I know this because I’ve
found out how to speed the process up”
“ But what is the hair for” I asked again
“ That is a secret, a very great secret “ he
said in thick dark Hungarian tones
“ but if you could discretely collect the hair
of certain other violinists I can name , I would pay
much for it. I think you would know others ? “ he asked, getting very
close to the barber,
“and
I think they must suspect something because, you must have noticed, in
your trade, how few of them get their hair cut. But they must sometime and it
would be very valuable..... ....“
just
then the shop door opened and
a lady of rather severe aspect looked in
“ Oh, there you are ! “ she said looking at
him with contempt
“ Up to your old tricks again ! What are you
being today, a foreign diplomat, or conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic ! “
They both left and I never saw him again.”
With that the barber brought his mirror up at
the back of my head so I could see his handiwork.
“
Is that all right ? “
and while I extracted the modest fee from my
pocket,
“
Next please ! “
©
E.J.Pearson, June 2005