I take three fistfuls of tap water and use them to moisten my ludicrous bulge of hair. I have been alone at this point for nearly a month—writing, or typing at least, in the waterlogged valleys of Wales—and my hair now resembles a sort of lush tumbleweed. As a hairstyle beneath which to lead the Life of the Mind, it is something I almost cannot rate too highly. Sections of it, when twiddled around a finger, have shown some promise as a stimulant to cogitation. And it converts automatically to a pillow during the frequent and sudden naps that litter the workday of the professional thinker. But as a hairstyle to talk to people from beneath—and I have been led to believe that there will be people arriving tomorrow at lunchtime, some of them possibly ladies—it will emphatically not do.
For what it’s worth, there is a barbershop in the nearest town, just a green half hour’s drive away over the hills. But it is not worth much, to be honest, for I have seen what they do to people in that place, and while I think I understand on some level why it is they feel they have to do it—the bleak categories of rural society would very quickly be disordered if people suddenly started looking attractive—that is not the same thing as wanting them to do it to me.
