Last week I committed the cardinal sin of going to a different hairdresser.
I'm perfectly happy with my usual hairdresser - we have a good relationship - as far as you can have a good relationship with someone you hardly know and (probably) have very little in common with. We have a little bit of chat but then she provides me with several thick magazines, so we don't have to make too much conversation. She is beautiful, young and glossy - like a freshly wrapped boiled sweet, but she doesn't make me feel like an irrelevant piece of shit. And, when I'm paying the bill, she always remembers to apply the corporate discount (I don't get many perks at work but that's one of them).
So, it wasn't a grievance against her that propelled me to another institution, it was simply that I was going on holiday and wanted to get my hair done. We'd booked a fairly last minute break, I was crazy busy in the run up and tried to get an appointment the week before the hols but had no joy.
Let me tell you about my hair - it's thick and it grows fast. When I was growing up, everyone used to go on about how lovely it was. Basically however hideous I felt and feel, I always felt that the one thing I could rely on was my hair. My hair should have a Facebook page and Instagram account to itself, it lives a far more glamorous and important existence than I do and if it was a separate, sentient entity, I'm sure it would register it's disappointment at being stuck on such a spud-like visage as mine. However, let's just imagine that it's not a separate entity and imagine that it's part of me. I feel that I'm going to be punished for liking it. Pride comes before a fall and it's surely the ultimate sin, as a woman, to feel positive about any part of your body (is hair your body??)
So I went to this other hairdresser because a) I could get an appointment in the week before my holiday, b) I could make an online booking, rather than face the horror of speaking to a human person on the phone and c) they had a '50% off all colour treatments' on Tuesdays. I was nervous but optimistic. On the day in question a twelve year old girl led me over to my chair and asked me what I wanted done. She was my hairdresser. I think hairdressing must be like modelling in that you are on the scrapheap by the age of thirty and have to retrain as a racing car driver. When you enter a salon you have to make your peace with the fact that you will have your hair done by a highly skilled but sometimes malevolent child.
Just because she's twelve, I reasoned with myself, doesn't mean she's shit.
As an aside, I sometimes suspect that if I was a proper, serious person, I would have my hair cut into some kind of brutal, utilitarian buzz cut, however because I'm essentially a vain, foppish poodle, I persist with the long hair. I basically have to have it tied up for the whole of the summer anyway, otherwise I get too hot, so I do my spell of Spartan living then.
After we had a Q and A and slight tussle over the colour I wanted my streaks to go - she looked mildly incredulous at my choice of caramel swatch, she proceeded to do stuff with foil and bleach. The bleach smelled like the stuff you chuck down the toilet, rather than the stuff I'd smelled in the hairdresser before. The twelve year old didn't try to make conversation (fine) neither did she offer me a magazine. I couldn't get a signal in the salon so couldn't waste my time with a bit of pointless browsing either. I was left alone with my reflection - dreadful and my reflections - equally bad.
So you know I said my hair is thick - it's also quite knotty, especially when wet. The hairdresser dealt with this by tugging at it brutally with a horse brush. She also had those hard, pointy nails which made contact with my cheeks, on more than one occasion and ploughed ruthlessly through my roots. This was all manageable albeit not particularly pleasant, the worst part of the ordeal was when she kept asking me to put my head further back while she put foil and domestos in my crown. At points I wondered how far I could stretch my neck back before it snapped. Would my people-pleasing tendencies be the death of me?
So anyway, my neck did not snap, my hair looked ok, if a little orange, and, although they charged me more than the price I'd been quoted on the online booking form, I did at least manage to get my hair done before I went on holiday. Maybe the nails raking my face were like the scratches that one of the characters has to endure in The Horse and his Boy, to punish her for being responsible for getting her maid whipped - divine punishment for going to a different hairdresser!
