16th June - 'Yeah, that's fine mate'

I'm off for a haircut today, and it is perhaps one of my biggest frustrations of being a man, the regularity with which the lid needs trimming. My last cut came 4 weeks ago, and any fella will tell you, longer than this and you're struggling. 6 weeks and it's a mess, 8 weeks and it's a mop. Even after 2 weeks it starts to look a bit scruffy but at £30 a pop, I'm not in a position to be throwing sixties out monthly. I guess, for women, it's a bit different. You gals wait like 3/4 months, but then when you do go for it, you're forced to drop a few hundred on it, and you get all that stuff that we don't. The hair washing treatment, the magazines, the coffees, and the awful small-talk.

In all fairness, my regular barber has been offering me an ice cold bottle of Bud every time I go in recently. I'm not sure where he stashes them, but he just emerges with one from out the back like he's got some sort of magical brewery back there. Doesn't matter on the time, either. It could be 9am and he's still like, 'Want a beer, bossman?'. The fact he even uses the word 'bossman' is your indication that he's Turkish/Iranian/Cypriot, by the way. I hate to be politically incorrect, but I haven't asked him where he's from. It's defo somewhere around that neck of the woods because only fellas from that region (kebab shop workers especially) dare grace clients with the 'bossman' tag.

My barbers consists of 4 different workers, by the way. The first is a Polish fella with a beard. He bangs out the best cuts bar none, but you have to listen to his stories of how much weed he smoked or how drunk he got last night, throughout the experience. The second, is a Hector Bellerin (2014/15 season) lookalike. His cuts are alright, and his chat is fairly average too. 'What you doing today, you off work today?' etc etc. The one in the middle is rarely there, I think he's part-time. His cuts are a solid 7/10, but he's your typical 'Uxbridge' type. The ones that swan around Westfield thinking they're Drake, they live on the outskirts of Zone 6 but tell everyone they live in 'London', using terms like 'The Big Smoke' and 'Hustle Hustle Hustle' in their Instagram bio. This one wears a big watch, likely some designer rip-off from a dodgy market, and always complains to me about his pimped up cars with blacked out windows, like somehow owning a motor is a personality trait, whinging on why the government keep 'singling him out' for speeding fines, when he's doing 60 in a 30 zone. Oh my heart bleeds.

Lastly, there's the small little lad in the corner. I think he's of more of an Indian/Pakistan type descent. His chat is cool, in the sense that he doesn't really bother, which is just how I like it. But I've been highly wary of him ever since he completely undercut my beard back in February and I ended up looking like I had a thin line of black string taped around my jawline. He did, however, redeem himself last time out with a nice skin fade, but the problem of being a guy, is that no matter how bad they butcher your noggin', they'll hold that little mirror up at the end to ask your opinion, and you always reply in the same awkward British manner... 

... "Yeah, that's fine mate".