A long time ago...

Neil showed me some of the photos of Ali's stag last week, and while the jolly japery was much in evidence, it became apparent to me that my hair was getting a trifle ridiculous. So much so that while sporting the requisite fake moustache and Hawaiian shirt I made a startlingly credible drug baron. It was time for a haircut, so on Friday lunchtime I wandered into the Demon Barber on Broughton Street, as is my wont.

The guy that came over to cut my hair was new, and looked to be a little older and richer than the rest of the staff. His hair was cut a bit like mine, if a little shorter, so I asked him to just trim mine a bit and made a point of mentioning how his hairstyle would be a reasonable guide.

"'k then," he said, and off he went.

He wasn't much of a talker in standard barber/taxi-driver/old-man-at-the-bar terms, but it transpired that he was the owner of boom barbers (the lower case name should have set my wanky spider sense tingling) and had recently bought this branch of the Demon Barber.

"Good stuff," I thought. "Hopefully he'll know what he's doing."

How wrong I was, reader. How wrong I was.

Whereas previous haircut disasters have confined themselves to the arena of the mullet, whether sincerely intended as a fashion statement by a misguided hairdresser or as a consequence of general incompetence on their part, this was an almost preternaturally bad haircut. Take the general concept of the mullet - business at the front and party at the back - and add Oasis at the sides and spiky footballers' tuft on top and you are perhaps beginning to glimpse the enormity of what he had perpetuated on my head. Havoc was wreaked with my hair, and he had the temerity to disguise it with some glutinous "product". I paid my money, not yet able to understand the utter horror of my situation, and headed back to work whereupon I stuck my head under the tap, looked in the mirror and suppressed a scream of abject horror.

I can't show you a photo of it - frankly, you'd have to threaten me with being forcibly made to watch The Core over and over again before I'd even consider doing so - but fortunately I'll never have the opportunity to do so because I went straight out to get it fixed. I briefly considered going straight back to the Demon Barber to demand that the fuckwit who cost me twelve pounds sterling and eight months of hair growth make right his mistake, but it struck me that letting an crap and angry barber have a second go at my hair would not be the best course of action.

I went straight to York Barbers (a humble, down to earth establishment with the good grace to not even have a website, let alone a useless Flash-ridden abortion of one), vented my spleen at my coiffeur nemesis and begged the guy to sort me out. Twenty minutes later I looked A) five years younger and B) five times better. And felt about five times better into the bargain.

I did do other stuff last week, like go to see X-Men 3 (another excellent blockbuster - what's going on?) and visit Holy Island with Ash (a diverting little trip on which we managed to unintentionally avoid the main reasons to go there), but dear God! That haircut will live on in infamy.