Topiary Tales.

In a thin effort to dust off the cobwebs and re-validate the BLOG, here's a scan of a photo taken from a photobooth last Saturday down in Hobart at a pretty cool handmade arts/craft/design market.

Normally those kind of events are quite lame and tacky... but this one had a lot of really cool stuff, including a stall by Chris Downes and his wonderful auto-bio comics. If you're not checking his stuff out daily you're really missing out on some honest, funny and beautifully drafted comic work.

But I digress.

I should bring the topic of conversation back to ME. And my HAIR.

Look at how curly and wavy my hair looks in those photos. Whats up with that?

My regular trendy and expensive hairdresser and I have stopped being on the same page the last few haircuts. Getting a tad bored with my short/bike-helmet-friendly style I've been rocking the last few years and wanting to capitalise on the length of my over-due-for-a-haircut head topiary, I've asked him to do something with the length.
Which has ended in mixed results.

To cut to the chase of it he wants to get all trendy with my head while I seem to be heading (no pun intended) for more conservative styles.

To make matters worse, by hairdresser is a really nice, sincere Japanese lad who gets really upset at himself if I request any changes.

Afraid of him committing Japanese hairdresser ritual suicide (Japanese have a ritual suicide for any occasion), I cheated on him last week.

Throwing caution to the wind I went down to a local Italian barber. I walked in and asked for a haircut thinking I'd have to come back later in the week. (At my old place I'd have to book in at least a week in advance.) But NO. I got one right there and then.

While I missed my usual shampoo and head massage from Yuski's lean but strong deft fingers, the Italian barber experience wasn't too bad. We made small talk about the weather and shaving
techniques (That morning I'd given myself a rare clean shave). Discussed the finer points of the cut-throat razor and such.
I was pretty happy with the final result, and paid less then half what I would've normally spent!

It was always a bit of a fantasy of mine to go and get a $5 haircut from a barber. Needless to say the price of a simple men's cut has gone up over the years, but I have only ever gone to a cheap mens barber (as an adult) twice before now.

The first was in 1998. I remember it well. I went in, asked for a short back and sides with a little off the top and walked out with a STEP.
This was in 1998, I remind you. Not the 80's when it was fashionable. And I was 24 years old.

The resulting stress of that bowl haircut gave me the Shingles. True story.

The second time was a few years ago when I was in London, unemployed, poor and in desperate need for a haircut. A reckless desperado, if you will, willing to pay the littlest amount possible for (once again) a short back and sides. A classic haircut that will never go out of style and (one would think) be impossible to mess up.

I ended up at a 6 quid barbershop run by some ex-communist Eastern Europeans. I may have already told of this story before somewhere in the archives. (Maybe around late 2005??).
Long story short, I paid my 6 quid and got a pretty rough haircut and an offer to buy a satellite dish. Go look it up in the Diggsville archives if you want the longer story.

Anyways.... like I was saying before I was rudely interrupted by my own red-wine infused rambling diatribes (YES, thats right! It's after 5pm on a Friday! It's ALLOWED!), I'm pretty happy with my current haircut.

Don't get me wrong- I'm not going to win any cutting edge (once again, no pun intended. Really.) style contests but trust me when I say I MAKE IT WORK.

The other weird thing is that people have been telling me I look younger.
This might have to do with the haircut and my clean shave or my daily moisturising routine.


BUT THATS ANOTHER STORY.