Cut & Run.


The barbershop I frequent disappeared in the dead of night and now I don’t know where to get my hair cut.

I should explain: I live close to a barbers’ that I’ve been using ever since my previous hairdresser sadly died a few years back. I’d been visiting the last guy for years, who also happened to be my old landlord, so when he passed away, I was at a loss; he'd been so familiar with my bonce, I never had to say how much I wanted off. Not long after he died, I had a haircut so disastrous I walked into the shop next to me immediately afterwards to ask if they could fix it, and the patch-up job was so successful I’d been going there ever since; well, until yesterday, that is.

It was in the morning that I realised the game was up: on leaving my flat for town, I noticed the shop had been stripped bare. The price lists in the window and the kitch Fifties pictures on the wall had all gone. Even the signage had been taken down; the business may as well never had been there. A shop that had been thriving just a few days previously had vanished into the ether; it was a mystery worthy of an episode of Mr Benn.

The fact it disappeared without a trace is very sinister. Bizarrely, it's the second barbers' on the premises to vanish overnight. Were they forced out by a protection racket so extortionate that they couldn’t make the payments? Were they sent into the river Hiz in cement shoes? Was there some sort of reverse Sweeney Todd situation in the offing? I dread to think.

Perhaps they’re having a refit. If so, it had better open again again soon as my hair's already unruly, and I don’t want to go back to the gimp who fucked it up before; that time, I resembled Rowan Atkinson in The Black Adder, which is not a good look; I may as well have thrashed away at my head with a bunch of keys.

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