No Hairun, Scareum

Joanne McCarthy stole my intended title ‘Hair today, gone tomorrow’ in her Newcastle Herald article. Shame that…. I thought it was appropriate. Never mind, we’ll soldier on.

When I was a youngster my mother used to use ‘Curly Pet’ in my unruly blond hair to make me look ‘her gorgeous little man’.

As I got older my hair darkened and straightened. I was always a ‘short back and sides’ person, though I remember sometimes having a part down one side then for a change down the other. At one stage it was ‘Brylcreemed’ and plastered down. At another it was a brushback.

I never had a crewcut, though I looked at my mates who had one with envy and I couldn’t quite capture the ‘Elvis’ look like some of my other friends though I did try when I was in high school.

Around 1964 while in the CMF (Citizens Military Forces) I followed the fashion and grew a moustache for a while and thought that was pretty cool and debonair. I remember we had a moustache growing competition over a two week period and there was one fellow (who probably had northern Italian genes) who grew a better bushy black moustache in one day than the rest of us did over the two weeks. By comparison our efforts were rough and scruffy until they had had longer time to ‘mature’.

I was clean shaven when I married in 1968.

Receding hairline started to appear – slowly, not sacrificing thickness so much to begin with.

Geoff was born in 1971.

In 1973 Warren was born and I grew my first beard. Now that is stuff that men are meant to do. I shaped it in the best ‘Abraham Lincoln’ style and grew it fairly long.

One day in about 1976 I slipped while ‘cutting the firebreak’ and messed up my ‘look’ and decided to cut it all off. Imagine my dismay when I presented myself to the family and the boys who never remembered me without a beard broke up and laughed at me. I didn’t think it was funny. I mean to say was I that strange to look at?

The short answer to that experience was I grew it back and while its shape may have changed I haven’t been without it since. Peter, my youngest son has never seen me any other way.

It was always a big waste of time in my opinion – the process of showering, drying and doing your hair, but something we’re all saddled with. That is until……….. one day I looked in the mirror and saw my father looking back at me with thin greying hair (that was scary, he’d been dead for a couple of years by then). I shook my head and looked again and this time it was me looking back but not all that different except for a salt and pepper beard with a hint of ginger thrown in. It couldn’t be that I was getting ‘old’, I was still feeling I was a young fella though maybe the calendar wouldn’t agree.

These days I’ve decided to keep the hair out of my eyes and have a ‘clean sweep’ look. I go to the hairdresser across the road every four weeks (my hair has grown about a centimetre by then – that is Tom, Dick and Harry [they all have names now])

And get a ‘number one’ with the clippers top, back and sides, and a ‘number two’ on the beard. Takes her all of five minutes, costs me $10, and I’m out of there all suave and a legend in my own mind once again. Ready to be cheeky to anyone and everyone. I think that comes with being comfortable in my own skin these days and maybe age has something to do with it too, as I don’t care what other people think.

I still think young, but my body tells me it’s all a lie and my brain has a good ‘forgetary’. Never mind, I’m happy – that’s the main thing.

Fashion over the centuries has given us some really weird concepts of what looks good. In early times people wore their hair long or hacked it off to various lengths and tied it back or let it flow. They wore head bands or bandanas. Then the kings and queens and fashion leaders started wearing make-up and wigs and powdered their hair and wigs and wore fancy clothes.

As a throw-back to those days the court judiciary in some courts still wear a ‘dead possum with curlers’ on their heads.

That’s enough to scare any little kid in the street.

We’ve gone through the ‘beetles’ longhair cut, long scraggly hair, the Johnny Farnham look, the mullet, spikes, surfers dreadlocks, coloured hair, patterned cuts, no hair, the weird US Army look - shaved back and sides with a little short patch on top. And to quote Joanne McCarthy again ‘some with looks like a bleached parrot or a fading pineapple’.

Daggy one day, revolutionary the next.