Let me say from the off that I hadn’t paid for a haircut in thirty years.  Our Gert had always cut mine with a Remington set to No 3 all over.  The downside has been that I missed some young bint pushing her baps in my ears while asking me about my holidays.  There’s not quite the same frisson with the wife.  But the upside has been that it’s free, albeit a little vigorous and my head resembled a patchy lawn when she’d finished.

But as we were strolling down Gowthorpe the other day a photo of George Clooney in the barber’s shop window caught her eye.

“Go in and get one of them”, she said to me.

“But you do my hair”, I said.

“I can’t get it to look like that”.

“But it’s six quid!” I said.

“Worth it if you can look like that”.

Now even the biggest of my worldwide fans will understand that it would be a tall order for me to look like George Clooney.  And six quid is about one thousand per cent more than when I last paid at Tin Bob Martin’s.  So you can see my reluctance.  But nevertheless, she pushed me in while she went off to the Chinese Nail Bar to part with a ton of my money.

There wasn’t a queue so a swarthy youth gestured me towards a chair while three other swarthy youths maintained their disinterest, ogling their phones.  All except one, that is; who, I could see in the mirror, rather disconcertingly stood behind me, stropping a cut-throat razor.

So after a couple of seconds trying to remember and convey to the youth what Our Gert had instructed me to say, he set about my hair with Remington shears, set at No 3.  A couple of minutes of that and then on to some scissor work, feathering my hair up so it looked like Simon’s on The Inbetweeners, before snipping it off.

All the time Sweeney Todd behind me kept stropping, persuading me against masturbating under the smock I wore as I used to do with the lady hairdressers many years previous.

Then, quick as a flash, Remington Man zipped his shears across my eyebrows which, I have to say, grow faster and thicker these days than the hair on my head.  The Remington stalled a bit like my Flymo does in the long grass. He muttered something gutturally unintelligible to which I too hastily and unwisely answered “Yes”.  At that, he shoved two plugs of molten wax up my nostrils followed seconds later by his setting fire to my ears.

But I’m not an English Man for nothing and suffered this with outward stoical indifference; I was showing Johnny Foreigner a thing or two, I can tell you.

When he’d finished alternately setting the hairs in my ears on fire and then batting me hard across them to put them out, without warning he yanked out the two plugs of wax from my nose.  For a split second I thought he’d pulled out my prick as well.  But no; they’d simply cooled and set, capturing and harvesting a forest of nasal hair.  They looked like dandelion seed heads.

It was then that Sweeney Todd moved in on me from behind, mercifully just to shave my neck hair.

When it was done a youth on the till said to me “Nine poun' pliss”, without ever looking up from his phone.

“Ah!” I thought “three pounds for the extra pleasures". 

But then the unkindest cut of all.  “No, Azal” said Toddy. “Six poun'”. He  grinned at me “Ol' man’s price”.