As I get older my troubles with hair multiply. Not on my head you’ll understand, that area diminishes day by day and the once lustrous mane of conditioned dark beauty becomes a thin, wispy, grey sadness. Elsewhere on my body unwanted sproutings abound. They have to be tracked and tamed with tweezer and blade. So it is that I have a sharp eye for the hirsute, the bald, the well-kempt and the shaggy when I am out and about in society.
What on earth is going on? No longer can I assess a man’s character by the visible filaments growing from head and chin. Standards have been scrambled. Stubble is sexy, bald is beautiful and dishevelled is delightful. The females of the species seem to have kept their dignity and style rather more admirably than the male. As they ‘suffragette’ their way to universal parity, smartness and elegance have been allies in the march of progress.
I hope that the hair-language that I grew up with doesn’t get sidelined along with the sideburns. Will we always be able to split hairs or keep our hair on? Will I continue to not turn a hair when I am in control or come within a hair’s breadth of disaster when I brake too late on the motorway? Hair raising! Perhaps in my attempts to make subtle distinctions, I will no longer split hairs. My temper, like the NRA’s guns may, thankfully, dispense with a hair-trigger. Dispense with the whole gun, I say.
Let me return, via a hairpin bend to my main theme. I judge people by their hair. No apologies. Plenty of evidence to support my theory. You are your hair. Back in the fifties when I first made hair observations, most men and women were neat and tidy up top. Brilliantine and brylcream and the barbers’s razor tamed the male thatch. Well-tamed curls and ubiquitous hairpins were the order of the day for females. The hair ‘salon’ became ubiquitous. Neatness was all, shabby was not chic. Mick Jagger and Joni Mitchell changed all that. We were plunged into an uncertain hair-world where the cut of a man’s jib and mane was no indication of his character.
I have spent years in deep study of the association between the barnet and the person. There is a direct link between hair (or lack of it) and competence/integrity. Baldness I rate highly. Gandhi, Harry Hill, Vince Cable (nearly) to name but a few. Proto-baldies such as Elton John, Wayne Rooney and Rob Bryden also score well. Mussolini is the exception that proves the rule. Neaties like Obama, Mandela, Macron and Huw Edwards are beyond reproach. The Queen comes into this last category as does Fiona Bruce and Moira Stewart. Federer and Williams; Harry Kane. No place for Mother Theresa May, I fear.
You can see where I might be heading. Dishevelled. Boris. John Bercow – did you see him in the Commons yesterday? Scarecrow hair. Diane Abbot and Jezza Corbyn. Amber Rudd. No wonder she resigned. All dreadful. Let’s include those with an abundance of ‘products’. The gelled quiff, the narcissistic spray. Trump, Jeremy Rhyming Slang, David Dickinson.
Compare Michael Barnier with David Davis. Chic v Shabby. No wonder Brussels has London by the short and curlies. No wonder Pouty Gove has been to the barber to smarten himself up. Theresa is getting grooming to the top of her priority list. Greg Clarke, Jeremy, Sajid Javid, Philip Hammond and Esther McVey indicate that she has shifted her policy from the hedge to the hairdresser.
I have to blog like this for light relief, you’ll understand. While politicians on both sides seem to ignore the national interest in pursuit of low-minded in-fighting and the scoring of Westminster bubble-points, the rest of us watch in anguish. Mother Theresa, please address the nation and not just your party. Try to inform and engage us rather than mollify that jumped up twit-twat Rees-Mogg. His hair, by the way, reminds me of Adolf.
I’m off to have a shave.
simplysorro 