Same as Last Time

This is a story about trying to hold on to a self you’ve only just managed to build. About hair as armour, as ritual, as one small thing you can control when the rest keeps shifting. It’s about being young, being seen, and what it takes to stay seen. A good haircut can make you feel invincible. A bad one can undo you.

Same as Last Time

The trick was to hang your head over the end of the bed. Not halfway. All the way, until blood pooled and the angle was right for Emil’s geometry to reveal itself. Gel first, then hairspray, then the whine of the blow dryer—not aimed, but ushered. The strands rose, slow and deliberate, until the shape locked in—more ritual than style.

It had started back in Chesterfield, in the little salon where Emil—once the bane of St John’s Ambulance cadets, now rebranded with a softened vowel—had figured out how to feather my hair so gravity could be reverse-engineered. Emil had been a menace on the annual getaways, where we got to enjoy a free weekend at one of Derbyshire Miner’s Holiday Camps, in exchange for learning bandaging techniques, perfecting the recovery position, and learning how to treat mining-related injuries. It was still spelled E-M-I-L, but he now pronounced it Emile, and took pleasure in playfully teasing women of a certain age who mispronounced it.

Back in those earlier years, he’d been the ringleader in a gang that would terrorize younger cadets: pinning them on the floor or on a bed, pulling down their trousers and underpants, and blacking their testicles by applying shoe polish with a stiff brush. It never happened to me. But I lived in fear of it for years. Apparently, the pain was one thing, but it was the slow, humiliating process of scrubbing off the thick, greasy polish that stayed with you—the sting of the brush, the stubborness of the polish , and the shame that clung longer than the colour. That fear stayed tucked away—lessened, maybe, but never gone. Even years later, sitting in Emil’s chair, part of me still flinched at the idea of surrendering control. Now he wielded thinning shears with something approaching grace.

By twenty-one, I’d stopped colouring my hair every week, so no more henna-stained pillowcases, but the ritual had simply shifted form. Style over shade. Height over hue. At college, I was always being miscast as an art student. People would tilt their heads and say, “You’re in... Fine Art? Design?”

“Computer Science,” I’d reply, and watch them recalibrate.

They’d laugh. Embarrassed. “It’s the hair. The way you dress. Your makeup.”

That started in 1978, the year my mum died. I wasn’t ready to grieve the usual way, so I masked it: mascara, hair dye, outlandish clothes. Let them see that boy, I thought. A boy who looked like he belonged on the cover of Smash Hits. In my first weeks at Brinsford, the cleaner walked into my room in K-block and saw the makeup on the windowsill. She blocked the doorway, assuming I was in the wrong room. It took a while to convince her. The chocolate helped.

Fair enough, if it were still 1979, when I’d first turned up in eyeliner, scarlet zip-up trousers, and ex-RAF jackets festooned with punk badges. But by the end of 1981, I was a married man (okay, more of a married boy), and the makeup had gone. The hair, though—that stayed. My hair wasn’t spiky anymore—I just prided myself on making it different from everyone else’s, by style, by colour, or both. Not rebellion anymore. Just ritual. Something to keep doubt at bay.

Everyone else had nicknames that came with their surnames. 'Muddy' Slinger; 'Spider' Webb; 'Tiny' Cox. Mine was different. Mine was earned.

Spike.

Not Rob. Not Fordy. Just Spike.

While the spikes didn’t last—I eventually moved on to a Phil Oakey–inspired asymmetric bob, long on one side and post-war short back and sides on the other—the nickname stuck. By then, I’d found a different swanky salon in Wolverhampton. Very expensive, but always on the lookout for models. If you timed it right, they’d cut you a break on the price. I’d been there with various friends over the first couple of years, and while their results were sometimes a bit hit or miss, I always seemed to come out with something special. I’d bring in pages ripped from one of the music weeklies—magazine fragments smelling of ink and pocket lint—and they’d study them like blueprints. Then the master stylist would be summoned, murmuring suggestions, adjusting angles, guiding the process like a conductor easing into the overture. The result was uncanny.

With that as a backdrop, I honestly don’t recall what prompted me to try the local Polish barber on the estate where we lived in Heath Town. Maybe convenience. Maybe curiosity. Maybe just a lapse in aesthetic judgment. I was popping down to the little shops that sat in the centre of the open-access housing complex, and just as I walked past the barber shop, I remembered I was due for a haircut. "Why not?" I thought. To get the model rate at my regular salon, I had to pre-book weeks in advance and be prepared to change plans at the last minute. Here, there was no queue. No ceremony. No waiting. Just a red vinyl chair and a severe-looking man with a buzz cut who looked like he sharpened his scissors on bricks.

But when I walked in, I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. It reminded me of Stan the barber, where I’d get my hair cut alongside my dad as a little kid. I always loved every minute of Dad-time. Stan had this tiny place in Holmewood, and he believed a liberal dollop of Brylcreem was the pièce de résistance to any haircut. He wore short-sleeved nylon smocks over long shirts, and his scissors and combs would rest between snips in a glass of fragrant blue disinfectant. Your head would always end up smelling of it by the time he was done. His was the kind of barbershop where, at the end of the cut, he'd always discreetly ask, “Anything for the weekend?”—and everyone except me knew exactly what he meant.

Heath Town in those days was a collage of brutalism and bravado: concrete towers with peeling paint, kids wheeling BMXs across broken walkways, multilingual arguments drifting through cracked windows. It had warmth, yes, and community—but also corners you didn’t linger in. We were the racial minority and stuck out like sore thumbs—visible, peripheral, not quite belonging.

That first time—oh yes, I went back—I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary. He wasn’t as talkative as other barbers, but when I told him what I wanted, he nodded, said “yes,” and immediately jumped in. This was in the midst of the Mod revival, and I’d opted for a retro ’60s look—short back and sides, with more length on top. He made short work of it, and it looked fantastic. What’s more, it was about a third of the heavily discounted ‘model’ rate at the swanky place. I couldn’t believe my luck.

It wasn’t just me that thought that—everyone did. People were asking me where I’d got my hair cut, and I’d be bragging about this great place I’d discovered... no waiting... no hassle... all at very little cost.

It must have been about six weeks later when I very confidently returned to the same barber.

As I sat in the chair, he smiled enthusiastically, which I took for recognition. I relaxed.

He didn’t say anything—just stood poised with his scissors. It felt a little awkward, so I decided to break the ice by gushing about my last hair cut, how much everyone liked it, and then went on to say that I wanted it exactly the same.

He paused, set down the scissors, and picked up his trimmers, switching the guard to what I now know to be a #2. I consider that to be the perfect length for the sides and the back of one's head, and that is where I assumed he was going to start.

No. What he did instead was take the trimmers and make a pass from my forehead to the back of my head. Realising what he was doing, I screamed—but it was too late. As Magnus Magnusson used to say: he’d started, so he had to finish.

I tried to explain the horrors of what he’d done, but that was when I learned I'd pretty much already reached the limits of his English. It didn’t go much beyond that emphatic “yes” and his eerie ability to parrot sentences back without understanding a single word they meant.

That was how I ended up with a #2 buzz cut, and I was crying by the end of it. There was no shame involved—just acceptance of how awful it looked. Buzz cuts look great on some people, but I am just not one of them. Plus, because my hair was so blond back then, I looked close to bald.

I ran back to the flat, determined to try and do something about it before Roz saw me. She happened to come out of the kitchen just as I was trying to sneak up the stairs. She didn’t need to say a word.

"It's not as bad as it looks," I said. It was. "It will look better after I wash it," I said. It didn’t.

Still, I tried. I got in the shower and scrubbed at my scalp like I could rinse away the mistake. When that failed, I moved to stage two: damage limitation. Somewhere in the back of a drawer, I still had a box of copper-coloured hair dye. I convinced myself it would help. Funny how little dye you need when you barely have any hair left. Funnier still, how wrong you can get it.

Remember when the Eurythmics first broke out with “Sweet Dreams,” and Annie Lennox had that whole close-cropped androgynous look with short orange hair? I had that look probably a year earlier. And trust me—I did not wear it well.

I took to wearing hats after that. For about eight weeks, I think, until my hair was back to a reasonable length.

While it was regrowing, I went home and thought about falling on my knees and asking Emil—Emile—to fix it. I imagined him tilting his head, the way he used to with clients who couldn't quite pronounce it right, that patient correction now tinged with judgement. In the end, I decided that would have been more humiliating than a 'blacking' would have been.

I learned my lesson, though. Never assume that a head nod means someone understands.

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