While having another haircut

1) How curious to be spending the best part of an hour staring at myself in the mirror.
2) In fact, I must be spending more time watching myself in the mirror right now than I do for the rest of the month put together
3) How many other professions would tolerate the customer staring at them doing their job constantly?
4) I am offered tea or coffee. This is a sign of service: I am paying to be pampered.
5) This is personal service. This is the nearest thing in the modern world to having one’s own tailor.
6) But a tailor would not chat to you about their holidays. Is this a democratised form of personal service, or is the conversation just the result of the awkwardness of proximity?
7) There is power distributed on both sides. I must keep her sweet so that she doesn’t rake my scalp with the comb, burn the nape of my neck with the razor, or chip splinters of flesh out of my ears. Keep talking.
8) This is the one element of male personal grooming that it is permissible to contract out to a third party.
9) This is, probably, the only element of male personal grooming that is more or less universally and regularly followed.
10) Can I imagine spending an hour a month getting my skin moisturised, or my feet decalloused?
11) It’s like lawnmowing, really.
12) Is it because your hair is the most animal part of your body?
13) It’s actually an act of being civilised not because of the element of personal service, but because it exerts control over your creaturely self.
14) The personal service is surely a sublimation of this necessary function of controlling the animal.
15) Perhaps then my slow hair loss is a sign of my becoming increasingly civilised.
15) I spend as much on my hair as I do on clothes.
16) Maybe I’ll get my head shaved.