Encounterism E-Book

Andy Field

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 382

Beschreibung

'Andy Field's book reawakens us to the neglected majesty, charm and beauty of the everyday. His book returns us to a childlike state of wonder. It's profoundly charming - and, in the best sense, lovely.' - Alain de Botton author of The School of Life and The Course of Love Encounterism is a joyous immersion into the everyday pleasure and shared humanity we stand to lose in an increasingly digital world. Andy Field explores both different kinds of and different venues for human encounters, from the hairdressers to the cinema, from nightclubs to eateries, shops staffed by people and free-form urban parks; these are the everyday yet invaluable spaces that allow for human encounters that enrich our lives.Field writes with tenderness and wit - born out of twenty years as a performance artist creating scenarios in which people are encouraged to see and interact with each other afresh. In Encounterism he not only examines how we physically encounter both strangers and friends - in all our human grace and awkwardness - but builds to a manifesto for the importance of real-world interaction. A rousing reminder that our cities, our residential and work places, must still allow for the possibility of spontaneity and shared, in-person joy.'Andy Field is the freshest, most down-to-earth, most constantly surprising (and endearing) explorer of urban life I've read in a while ... And whether he's guiding us into mass snowball fights on the streets of London or the meaning of holding hands, this unmet stranger cheerfully reminds us all of the value of touch and the virtue of trying to see the world anew.' - Pico Iyer, author of The Half Known Life and Autumn Light

Leseprobe

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First published in 2023 by September Publishing

Copyright © Andy Field 2023

The right of Andy Field to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

ISBN 9781914613234

Ebook ISBN 9781914613241

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

For BD

How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, habitual?

To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it.

—Georges Perec, Approaches to What?

Contents

Authors Note: About Dazzlement

1. The Importance of Care

2. Six Small Interruptions

3. A Short History of Not Going Out

4. A Home You Can Carry with You

5. Society in Six Meals

6. Ecstatic Escape

7. A Great Green Emptiness at the Centre of Everything

8. Space to Dream

9. The Simple Pleasure of Holding Hands

Postscript: Some Things to Do with This Book Now That You Have Finished Reading It

Acknowledgements

Notes on Sources

Author’s Note

About Dazzlement

Like a lot of children, when I was young I was fascinated by all the banal details of the adult world—those little everyday things that my parents and the other adults around me seemed to hardly notice any more. I remember how exciting the idea of a drive-through restaurant was, or going to the hairdresser’s. How on holiday we would stand on some foreign street corner and hail a taxi and it would stop just for us. The way car drivers flashed their headlights to say “thank you” to one another and how I could call the receptionist at my dad’s office and be transferred right to his desk. Rather than putting on little plays for my family, one of my favourite games was setting up a shopfront at my bedroom door and asking my brother to request various items so that I could go and check if we had them in stock. This adult world, it seemed, was a place of infinite complexity and wonder. A treasure trove of weird rules and routines just waiting to be discovered.

It is hard to retain this excitement as you get older, and to some extent this is probably a good thing. To move through life in a state of relentless wonderment would be both exhausting and time-consuming; stopping to marvel at every vending machine, thrilled anew each day by the process of ordering a coffee. Nonetheless, as an adult I have found it useful to try and keep hold of some of this fascination as a way of drawing my attention back again and again to the parts of the everyday world that often get overlooked.

“We must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street,” the artist Allan Kaprow once declared, and that dazzlement is what I have spent much of my life chasing. How do we allow ourselves to be amazed by something we encounter every day? How can we approach the world around us with the kind of concentration we normally only reserve for things we deem important or special?

One of the ways I have tried to answer these questions is through the work I make as an artist. I have spent most of the last sixteen years creating unusual performances in everyday locations—in cafés and cinemas, on rooftops, in parks, and out on the crowded streets of towns and cities. Doing so has meant spending a lot of time thinking carefully about these everyday spaces and the kinds of encounters we have in them. Using performance to render the ordinary briefly strange in the hope that doing so might enable people to see it differently.

This book is an extension of that work. It draws from this history of messing around in everyday life to tell stories about a range of ordinary human encounters. The kind of interactions—with hairdressers, nightclubbers, or strangers we pass on the street—that would normally disappear unnoticed into the great ocean of activity occurring around them. Our lives are littered with these encounters. Little interactions occupying a grey space between ritual and routine. Ways of meeting we have grown accustomed to, perhaps even taken for granted.

This book is a story told in nine essays about some of those encounters. Some are encounters with strangers, others with friends and acquaintances. Some happen out in the world and others in places like cinemas and public parks or even on the phone.

Although the idea for this book predates the coronavirus pandemic, much of the writing of it took place in the caesura it created, when most of us found ourselves separated from the activity of our ordinary lives and these familiar encounters were temporarily rendered distant and strange. As the world has opened back up again, I have found myself approaching it with a renewed enthusiasm, ready to be newly dazzled by the wondrous complexity of our interactions with each other.

I hope that you, too, might find yourself dazzled by the nine ordinary encounters I describe here. By writing about them in such detail, I hope to encourage all of us to take greater care over them, and by doing so to take greater care of each other.

Encounterism

Chapter 1

The Importance of Care

In the beginning, there was only hair. Tangled, muddied brambles of hair. Primordial forests of hair. A great, lumpen Pangaea of hair. Hair as far as any eye could bear to see. And then, at some point, there must have been the first haircut. Not hair pulled out from the root in anger or despair, but hair cut deliberately and with some degree of care.

The bare skulls of our earliest ancestors tell us little about the hair on their heads, and although we know humans have used sharp stone tools for hundreds of thousands of years, we don’t know if those tools were used for haircutting. What we do have is human remains from as long as twenty-five thousand years ago, and we know that by that time some women wore their hair long in braids whilst some men had theirs cut very short. And by three thousand years ago we have a description of a haircut in the first known work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. At some point, then, people grew used to sitting down in the shade of some wide tree or by the warmth of the fire, breathing that little bit lighter as they felt the sharp blade moving close to their soft skin, talking or perhaps not talking, but trusting enough to know that they were safe, that they were being looked after.

And now, many thousands of years later, here I am, sitting in a metal chair in a quiet salon on a busy East London street, staring at my reflection in the mirror and waiting. Outside, people stroll along in the June sunshine, talking on their phones, music pouring out of the windows of passing cars, but in here the world feels remarkably still. The chair I’m sitting in is big and sturdy, all chrome and worn red leather and, with a cape fastened tightly around my neck, I feel ten years old again. I close my eyes and remember.

We would all ride the bus into town, my dad, my brother, and I, to go to Il Barbiere on Magdalene Street in Cambridge, where we would sit and wait our turn for a short back and sides, reading old magazines and bickering. I remember the wet, perfumy smell of the barbershop and how, when it was my turn, they would lay a stack of folded white towels on the chair to boost me up to the right height and how I would sit as still as I could, staring down at a framed picture of the boxer Rocky Marciano propped neatly on the sideboard, gloved fists held up to the camera.

In my present-day salon there are no framed pictures of boxing legends, only shelves full of expensive-looking haircare products, but the feeling is still the same. Propped up on my temporary throne, I am one part sun king, one part human sacrifice.

This is a familiar feeling but one I have not had for a while. Whilst the pandemic smouldered away, all the hairdressers and barbershops in London were shut and people made do with self-administered trims or the best efforts of a flatmate or a loved one. Hair grew wild and free again. But now the world is reopening and for some reason I have made this trip to the hairdresser the first stop on my tentative journey back out into it. Why is that? Why begin here?

It is more than purely vanity. I have missed the experience of being in this salon. I have missed being sat here in this chair, swaddled in a cape, listening to the radio and the soft chirping of the scissors. I have missed the other less visible ways that a haircut prepares me for my entanglements with the social world. It is clear to me that I am not just here because my hair needs cutting, I am here for an encounter. I am here to experience a particular kind of care. A care that can be found nowhere else.

*

My hairdresser is called Susana. She is from Zaragoza in Spain. She has tattoos all the way up each thin arm and today is wearing a black vest top with the words Daughters of Satan written in big white letters. She is a pleasingly incongruous figure against the polite olive-green walls and designer tiles of the salon where she works.

Susana tells me that she always wanted to cut people’s hair, that when she was little she used to cut all her dolls’ hair, shorter and shorter and shorter until there was no more hair to cut, at which point she would run to her mum in tears. During lockdown, whilst her work as a hairdresser was temporarily suspended, she began rescuing sick and injured pigeons from the streets of London, bringing them to her small flat and slowly nursing them back to health. A year later she has created her own pigeon hospital and regularly receives calls from friends and rescue services about housing injured birds. She is currently looking after nine pigeons. She gives each of them a name when they arrive, all of them named for classical gods. Her most recent arrival is called Zeus.

According to Kurt Stenn in his book Hair: A Human History, some of the earliest hairdressers would have been medicine men, “spiritual caregivers” who made no distinction between treating the body and cutting hair. Their role was to balance the spirits of life and illness in the body, and to do so they would use “incantations, bloodletting, trepanning (boring holes into the skull), and hair removal to eliminate noxious spirits.” These were mysterious and powerful figures in their communities, given responsibility for the bodies and the souls of those to whom they tended.

Susana may not look much like a medicine man or a witch doctor, but there is something quietly mystical about her. She wears that old magic lightly, but she wears it nonetheless. Susana has cut my hair for several years now. She is kind and friendly and talkative, but I am still also a little afraid of her.

It’s not just Susana, though. I have always been a little afraid of hairdressers. It might be some lingering vestigial trace of their ancient, spiritual authority or it might be all those sharp scissors, but either way, in the chair I am in their power. There was the man at Il Barbiere in his plain white T-shirts with his picture of Rocky Marciano; the friend of my mum’s who would come to our house seeming somehow more glamorous than anyone in our small village was entitled to be, like a visiting dignitary or an undercover Hollywood film star; there was Magda in Edinburgh, who ran a pop-up hairdresser’s out of an anarchist café and offered each person who sat in her chair a shot of vodka; there was Richard at Open Barbers, who moved my parting from one side to the other in an act of unprecedented personal transformation; there was even, once, a nine-year-old boy who cut hair as part of a piece of performance art; and then there was Susana with her tattoos and her pigeons. I was in thrall to all of them.

Finding the right hairdresser is important. A 2018 survey by YouGov America found that over a third of Americans say they always get their hair cut by the same person, increasing to around half of those over the age of fifty-five, whilst a similar study in the UK found that over half of the women surveyed rated their relationship with their hairdresser as one of the ten most important relationships in their life.

When you find a good hairdresser you keep hold of them like few other things in your life. In their book Hair Story, Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps tell the story of a man called Cecil Brown who spent thirty-one years looking for the perfect barber until he finally found him at a barbershop in Philadelphia. Now, on Saturdays, he gladly travels nearly an hour to the barbershop and then waits several hours more for his moment in the chair.

This commitment, this fervour, is about more than aesthetics. Of course people want a hairdresser who can cut their hair nicely, but they also want someone they can spend an hour or two or three in intimate proximity with. It is important that hairdressers know what they are doing when wielding sharp blades so close to our eyes and ears, and it is just as important that they know what to do with our secrets, our worries, our banal small talk, our weird opinions. We need to believe that they will use their old magic wisely. That when we are under their power, they will take care of us. A relationship with a hairdresser is a mystical, intangible thing. It is about chemistry, perhaps even a kind of alchemy. And when that alchemy works, you hold on to it.

*

I am sitting in my metal chair and Susana stands behind me, neither of us looking at each other directly. Instead, we are looking together at our own reflections in the giant salon mirror in front of us.

In Encounters, the sociologist Erving Goffman writes that an encounter is a “focused interaction” during which “people effectively agree to sustain for a time a single focus of cognitive and visual attention.” According to Goffman, the effect of this shared and singular focus is to create a kind of temporary barrier between the people inside the encounter and everything happening outside of it. Stitched together in space and time, we create our own private reality, filtering out the parts of the world that are irrelevant to us and the encounter we are having. We become, for a while at least, a world unto ourselves.

Few encounters make this feel truer to me than a haircut. For this next hour or so, the entire world is contained in the mirror in front of me. All I can see is Susana and me. Neither of us really moves from this square metre or so of space. There are no phones. No screens. No intrusions from our lives outside of the salon. And our interaction is defined, for better or worse, by this profound, sometimes painful, lack of distraction. Yet, at the same time, this unbearable closeness is tempered by a kind of comforting distance. Making eye contact with Susana via her reflection in the mirror imbues our interaction with the illusion of a space between us that doesn’t really exist, as if we were talking over the width of a coffee table rather than close enough to feel the warmth of each other’s bodies on our skin.

Despite the density of modern cities, such intimacy with people who are not already close friends or lovers or members of our immediate family is unfamiliar and often uncomfortable. Our bodies react strangely to it. They prickle and flutter, clenching instinctively in anticipation of some more basic, physical human encounter; a confrontation of one kind or another.

The conventions of a haircut—the mirror, especially, but also the small talk, the cape, perhaps even a framed picture of a popular boxer—provide the means to help us navigate such closeness and the feelings it normally arouses. Inside this encounter, this miniature world, the awkwardness that normally accompanies bodies in intimate proximity is temporarily filtered out, and tenderness between relative strangers is accepted as normal.

But more even than this, looking in the mirror keeps Susana and me focused on the thing this encounter is really about—and that, unfortunately, is me. Although we are both visible in the frame, I am undoubtedly what Goffman might call “the single focus of cognitive and visual attention.” There I am, sitting right at the centre of the picture. A head on display, preparing to spend the next hour looking at myself as penance for the apparent vanity of wanting to get a haircut in the first place.

To see myself and to recognise myself being seen by others in this way is a part of learning to be human. Our whole sense of self is bound up in our relationship to the mirror. We use it to identify the moment at which babies become self-aware, and, more questionably, to differentiate animals that have self-recognition from those that don’t. It is shorthand for our capacity to recognise ourselves as individuals bound up in a fluid and dynamic relationship with the world around us. An encounter that is navigated via a giant mirror cannot help but be about the way we see ourselves, and our desire to understand the way other people see us.

In this way, the mirror that confronts us in the barbershop or the salon is not only there to show us our haircut in progress, but to act as a reminder of why our hair matters so much to us in the first place. It is a reminder of all the ways in which we are constantly caught in the twin acts of self-recognition and self-presentation, preparing a face to meet the faces that we meet.

*

It is at this point, the two of us stood there together in the mirror, that Susana always asks the same question, offered up each time like the opening line of a song we both know all the words to: What can I do for you today?

As she says it the world stops, the ceiling fans cease circling, the hairdryer cuts out, the radio falls silent, every car on the street comes to an immediate halt, birds are suspended in the air like ornaments hanging in a shop window. The sole living thing in an otherwise unmoving world, I stare at my reflection in the mirror and consider this question’s two possible answers.

Somewhere deep in my chest I hear the low gurgle of the answer I want to give.

What I want to tell her is to go wild. To do something completely new. Something outrageous. To shave it all off, or half of it off, or bleach it or dye it like a colour wheel. I want her to make it look like George Michael in the ’80s or Winona Ryder in the ’90s or like an extra from a film about outlaws escaping from a prison ship in outer space. I want her to be adventurous. I want her to be bold. I want to be bold. I want to be braver than I really am. I want the moment where I look up into the mirror and hardly recognise the person staring back at me. I want, more than anything, to be transformed.

They promised us a haircut could do this. Right from the beginning we were sold this particular dream. It is as old as our written record of haircutting itself. It is this idea of what a haircut can be that features in the ancient Mesopotamian poem the Epic of Gilgamesh, written on a series of stone tablets over three thousand years ago.

The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of the ancient Sumerian king Gilgamesh and a wild man called Enkidu, sent by the gods to stop the king from oppressing his people. Enkidu is raw nature incarnate, pre-human, as much beast as man, born from all the dirt and freedom and disorder of the world. Frightened of his primitive power, Gilgamesh sends the sacred prostitute Shamhat to seduce Enkidu, which she does remarkably successfully. After a week of relentless lovemaking Shamhat leads Enkidu to a green meadow where he drinks seven goblets of wine, causing his spirit to loosen and his face to shine. At which point a barber arrives and he has a haircut. With all the vestiges of his former wildness sheared away, Enkidu is transformed. He becomes a Man, a citizen of the modern world; separated forever from his animal spirit, he is now fit to walk the streets of the great metropolis of Uruk, fit even to become the most intimate companion of the king himself.

Here then begins our very human love affair with the myth of the transformative makeover. It is a story which has persisted across millennia, becoming the staple of Hollywood romcoms, from Cinderella to Sabrina to She’s All That, and the conceit behind approximately a billion hours of reality television. Because who doesn’t love an epic makeover? Who is not thrilled by that moment when the chair spins or the dry ice parts or the camera pans back to reveal a completely new person standing there before you, carved from the rough marble of the old one? And when we see that new person, how we all scream or cry or hold our hands to our mouths in shock and wonder. It is a kind of magic.

On YouTube you can find a whole subgenre of video in which barbers and hairdressers in various parts of the world film themselves giving a free haircut to a member of their local homeless population. It is a problematic, exploitative, and utterly compelling piece of self-promotion. In my favourite video we are introduced to Jose Antonio, known as “The Spirit of the Square,” in the sleepy corner of Mallorca that he calls his home. At the beginning of the film he looks wiry and ancient, as wild as Enkidu, his white hair cascading out from under an old baseball cap to meet the ends of his straggly white beard. He tells us that he is trying to get his life together, that he parks cars to save up enough money for a room to live in. We watch as the hairdresser carefully begins trimming and shaving, massaging shampoo into his scalp and applying dye to his hair and beard.

After she has finished he looks not like a new version of himself, but rather a different man entirely: a charismatic middle-aged lounge singer or the author of a series of popular science fiction novels or a long-lost son in search of the father he never knew or the ghost of Christmases past, here to remind the real Jose Antonio of what once was and could be again. “You’re not Jose Antonio,” he says tearfully to his reflection. “No one will recognise me . . . as long as I don’t tell them who I am, no one will recognise me . . . this has totally changed me. It’s not me.”

And when he walks back into the square in his new dark sunglasses, we believe in this transformation. We believe that something deeper, more profound than his hair has changed. We believe, even if only for a few seconds, that remaking oneself is that easy. That magic is real.

This, in the end, is what I want to believe, not just for Jose Antonio but also for me, for all of us. I want to believe that there is hope for us, too, that we might be just as easily reborn, might yet become the people we want to be. I want to believe in the possibility of our collective redemption. From Enkidu onwards, the implication has always been clear: a haircut has a sacred power that goes beyond appearances. It is a reshaping of the body that works its way deep into the soul.

I still dream of just such a metamorphosis, believing there might be some newer, better version of myself buried under my current hairstyle. When I’m facing the mirror and Susana asks me what I want doing, this is what I want to tell her. I want to tell her to take her scissors and cut me open, to reach down inside and find the new me hidden in there. But I never do.

The closest I ever got to summoning the necessary bravery was when I was seventeen years old and my mum’s glamorous hairdresser friend agreed to dye my hair red. I had just started sixth form after five gruellingly lonely and miserable years of secondary school. I was ready to meet new friends, to become a new person. I remember the chemical smell of the dye as I sat on an uncomfortable dining room chair in the middle of the kitchen floor. And I remember the thrill of it, the lightness in my chest, how close the alchemy of reinvention briefly felt. But even then I had opted only for some semi-permanent option that never made it as far as red, giving up at a deep orange and fading quickly to an anaemic pink. I hid my new hair under a baseball cap for several days until the dye had been washed away completely.

It is no surprise to me that I am not the adventurer I would like to be, but it is always something of a disappointment. I am still too attached to the old version of myself, too afraid that I might not like the new one.

And so when the world begins moving again, when the fan starts circling and the radio crackles back to life, I always give the second answer. I tell Susana that I would like the same as last time, that I want my hair to continue to look roughly as it did before. Maybe a bit shorter or longer at the front. Maybe with the clippers on the sides rather than the scissors. But fundamentally it should be the same. I am asking her to maintain the person I already am.

This answer is exactly what Susana has been expecting. She smiles and agrees, and then she guides me to the sinks at the back of the salon and begins washing my hair.

*

The first time a hairdresser washed my hair, I thought she might be playing some kind of trick on me. I was twenty years old, in a proper hairdresser’s rather than a barbershop for possibly the first time. The hairdresser left me at the back of the room with a hot towel over my face, and all I could think was that everyone else in the salon, customers and staff alike, was looking over and laughing. Such care, some people might dismissively call it pampering, was uncomfortable to me because I was so unused to it. I was used to having my hair cut in a room where Rocky Marciano was always there to reassure me that nothing unmanly was about to take place.

Now I think nothing of the fact that Susana finishes washing my hair by massaging my head, the tips of her fingers moving in small circles across my skull. How I love this part now, this pampering, this little anachronism, this gentle vestige of a time when the person who cut your hair might also treat the rest of your ailments, lance your boils, bleed you if you needed it.

Throughout history and across cultures, haircutting has been a service that people at all levels of society could access, which meant that for many people the care you received there was often the only kind of care available to you outside of your immediate family.

The link between hairdressers and surgery goes back nearly a thousand years. In 1215 the Roman Catholic Church decreed that it was inappropriate for monks to perform any kind of surgery, and so across Europe their knowledge and their tools were transferred to local barbers, who were considered the most suitable people for this new role given their familiarity with razor blades and scissors. For the following five hundred years, in Europe at least, most of the medical treatments available to ordinary people were performed by barbers. At a time when learned medical professionals were limited to courts and universities, they provided the closest thing most ordinary people could get to regular medical care. In China, too, traditional street barbers performed essential medical procedures, travelling from town to town, ringing a bell to announce their arrival.

The most obvious reminder of barbering’s past association with surgery is the red, white, and occasionally blue pole outside many traditional barbershops (including Il Barbiere in Cambridge). The colours on the pole signify the blood and bandages involved in bloodletting, whilst the pole itself is a symbolic representation of an actual bloodied and bandaged pole that patients would grip onto whilst the bloodletting took place, and which would then be left outside the shop as a bracingly graphic demonstration of the kind of services offered inside. Like the laminated pictures of brightly coloured breakfasts in the windows of a café, but in every way worse.

Whilst this gruesome little advertisement may be the most visible connection between hairdressing and medicine, the relationship continues to persist in other ways as well, not least in the way hairdressers of various kinds think about themselves and their job. It is there in the head rubs and the hot towels, in the free cups of tea and the agony aunt chats, in a barber’s commitment to the antiquated art of the cut-throat razor. As Nat “The Bush Doctor” Mathis, hairdresser extraordinaire and self-proclaimed inventor of the Afro, once said, “I’m just doctoring the hair. I’m a doctor.”

Online I found an interview with the great Bush Doctor himself, filmed in his little basement hair salon in Capitol Heights, Maryland. In it he talks softly about his life as a hairdresser—how he got his nickname, his many hairdressing inventions, how he came to meet and cut hair for the funk musician Chuck Brown, his love of singing, his former life as a roller-skating instructor. The camera scans across the room, picking out details from the salon, the detritus of a life well lived: neatly framed newspaper clippings, a photograph of Nat and Chuck grinning under a street sign for Chuck Brown Way, a painting of Nat as a handsome young man in a powder-grey suit, a sign reading, “Let Your Hair Be My Problem.”

“I remember one time I was thinking of getting out of the business,” Nat says, “and one person told me, they said, ‘You can’t get out of the business, you have too many people’s images that you have to care for.’ ” And when he says this, about the images he cares for, I want to be there, amidst that clutter of knick-knacks and mementos, breathing in the damp air, listening to the music of scissors and clippers.

Hairdressers are a particular kind of caregiver, whose roots run much deeper into the lives of ordinary people than any modern medical professional. And we might think of our encounters with them as acts of caregiving. From the moment when you settle into a familiar chair in front of a familiar mirror in a salon or barbershop or at home in the middle of the kitchen, you are being cared for.

A hairdresser takes care. Care both in the sense that they recognise and appreciate all the very real, very human meanings that our hair holds for us, and in the sense that they approach us with a certain precision, with calmness, with deliberate, methodical grace. And as has always been the case, hairdressers are for the majority of ordinary people the most common and consistent caregiver outside of their immediate family. A source of respite, remedy, and repair on almost any high street anywhere in the world.

In the UK alone there are around 41,000 hair and beauty businesses employing around 287,000 people, about the same as the number of nurses in the country and more than twice the number of opticians, physiotherapists, psychiatrists, and dentists put together. Barbershops and hair salons continue to rank amongst the ten most popular new businesses, which is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that on average, men and women in the UK visit a hairdresser approximately every six weeks, or eight times a year.

When the coronavirus pandemic shut down the world, there was much joking about the impact it had upon our hair. On Zoom screens across the world people began transforming like slow-motion werewolves, Enkidus in reverse, their hair breaking free of the styling that had contained it, growing wild and untamed, like weeds overtaking a neglected garden. Roots showing, ends split, beards everywhere. People commiserated with each other and waited impatiently for the salons to open again, which eventually they did.

And when they did we celebrated; we admired our reclaimed style, our highlights, our fringes, our flat-top fades, these little pieces of ourselves we had back again. But did we think enough about the other, less tangible things we had reclaimed? Did you appreciate your reacquaintance with that old soothing magic? With that ancient variety of careful attention? Did you feel that familiar warmth again, those hands moving over and around you, the comfort of being held in this very particular way?

*

I am back in the chair again. Susana is teasing my wet hair into the recovery position and I am waiting with bated breath for that first snip to happen. That moment when the scissors slice shut. The soft metallic cough as metal kisses metal and a first few curls of wet hair fall gently onto my shoulder. It is not a big deal, and yet maybe it also is.

Arguably the most famous of all haircuts is described in the Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah. Samson was a warrior blessed by God with outlandish strength who once massacred an entire Philistine army using only the jawbone of a donkey. He was a Nazirite, which meant he had made a vow to God which included the promise never to cut his hair. When he revealed this to his lover, Delilah, she betrayed him to the Philistines. “And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and had the seven locks of his head shaven off; and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.” (Judges 16:19)

The story of Samson and Delilah is told as a kind of warning, like so many other tedious warnings that men have issued through history, about the dangers of trusting the wrong woman. But what remains interesting about it is the way it imbues something as ordinary and domestic as a haircut with such tragic gravity. In Rubens’s famous painting of the scene, Samson lies face down in Delilah’s lap, his naked back as vast as a continent, a landscape of muscle and bone glowing amber in the flickering candlelight. A bearded servant leans over him, hands gently twisting as he reaches out to cut the first lock of hair, whilst Delilah watches on and soldiers gather in the doorway. Everything in the painting turns around this action, the scissor blades poised to close on a thick brown ringlet. It is the eye at the centre of Rubens’s baroque storm of colour and light. The explosion at the beginning of the universe. Every grain of paint on the canvas holds its breath, waiting for those scissors to close. This is a haircut elevated to the status of cataclysm. The snip heard around the world.

I may not feel like my hair is touched by God, but I still feel that tingle of transgression when the scissors first close around it. As I await that first snip I can feel an illicit thrill, like ancient sorcery. Try picking up a pair of scissors now and cutting off even a few thin strands. To me, it still feels dangerous. A spell of transformation that hovers briefly in the air and then is gone just as quickly.

Do other people feel this? In lockdown, as people began lifting pairs of scissors tentatively towards their own heads or those of their friends or relatives, did they feel that slight shake in their hand, that flicker of doubt, that crackle on their tongue, the metallic tang of some centuries-old promise being broken?

Or does the anxiety of those first few snips have another, more modern cause? In the pre-capitalist world, most hairdressers might have been medicine men, community elders or servants, their work intimately connected to a very specific set of cultural or religious practices, but now they are businesspeople as well as caregivers, and hairdressing in the present age is another product in a marketplace. As such, your style of haircut is as much about individual choice and private desire as it is about collective tradition.

This inevitably leads to the issue of communication. How do you go about explaining to your hairdresser what it is you want? How many magazine pictures are enough? Whenever I have attempted to ask for anything even vaguely new, I have watched my haircut take shape whilst gripped by a very particular kind of angst: a silent, internal howl. How is it going? Does that look good? Will they get it right? If it starts to go wrong, will I have the courage to say I don’t like it?

This failure to communicate, the problem of a breakdown in trust or understanding, is surely the great dread of any contemporary haircutting experience. In the ’90s TV sitcom Friends, for example, in an episode where Phoebe reluctantly agrees to cut Monica’s hair, Phoebe confuses Dudley Moore with Demi Moore, leaving Monica not with the stylish pixie cut of a young Hollywood sex symbol, but rather the neat, square mullet of a middle-aged British comedian. You may never have experienced a haircutting disaster quite this bad, but surely most people have felt some equivalent to Monica’s guttural horror when she realises Phoebe’s mistake, her hands reaching instinctively up to her head, grasping at the ends of her ruined hair as if she’s trying to stem the bleeding.

*

Despite the fear associated with that initial cut, I quickly relax into things. Susana’s salon is a safe place to me. It is somewhere I enjoy coming to, where the time seems to pass all too quickly.

Salons are rooms suffused by care, and as such an important kind of refuge from the rest of the world. For many people, the care they receive here is one of the most important and consistent forms of care they experience in their lives. It is a care that is manifested in many different ways, as learning, as friendship, as community.

David L. Shabazz describes Black barbershops in the US as “discursive spaces where identity is shaped as young men are initiated into manhood and African American culture.” Here the haircut is the magnet holding together a larger social ecosystem. Men come to have their hair cut, but also to hang out, to watch sports or the news, to listen to music, and, most importantly, to talk.

Steve James’s epic documentary portrait of Chicago and its people, City So Real, begins and ends with the city’s barbershops. They are his portal into the everyday life of the city. There is, on the one hand, the barbershop full of retired white police officers at Joe’s on 26th Street, the walls mosaiced with pictures of the Chicago Cubs and Tiger Woods, where they gather to eat dense slices of rich apple strudel, tease each other relentlessly, and complain that things aren’t how they used to be. And then, elsewhere on the South Side, there is Sideline Studio on a street split by a commuter rail line, its only signage a canvas banner pinned above the glass door. Inside, the young Black barber works away with his clippers and argues animatedly with an older man waiting for his turn in the chair. Their argument, like so many arguments in so many places, is about young people today, and what older people think is wrong with them and what younger people think those older people don’t understand. The argument flows back and forth, voices rising, other clients joining in. It is hard at points because the disagreement itself is hard, even intractable. But in the end we see the older man take his place in the chair, and the young barber with his clippers, gently shaping and reshaping.

And there is something to be witnessed here, about the kind of tenderness that a haircut demands, about how that gentleness permeates the room, how it insinuates itself into the conversations that are had there. “I say this because I love you,” the young barber says at the argument’s most strained point, and there is love here. A love that exists outside of the bonds of family, across ideologies and profound divisions of opinion. A love that is essential and increasingly rare.

The same kind of love can be seen at Open Barbers in London, the UK’s first queer- and trans-friendly hair salon. Open Barbers was founded in 2011 as a twice-a-month pop-up in a tiny hair salon in Kennington by two trans men, Greygory Vass and Felix Lane. They were inspired to do so by their own fraught and often humiliating experiences of getting haircuts, where judgements about gender were frequent even in supposedly unisex salons. With Open Barbers they wanted to create a space that was open to a broader, more expansive understanding of gender and identity and the part that our hair has in determining both how the world sees us and how we think about ourselves. Such was the demand for the kind of environment Greygory and Felix provided that within a few years they had opened their own permanent salon with an ever-expanding team of stylists.

More than anything, Open Barbers is about belonging. From their fire-engine-red shop just by Shoreditch Park, Greygory, Felix, and their team aim to give anyone who wants or needs it the kind of caring encounter that more conventional hairdressers and barbers have long provided for cis-gendered people. And perhaps inevitably, for that reason the shop has become far more than just a place to get your hair cut. It is a place where people come for acupuncture and massage, for therapy, for community-related gatherings, or simply to hang out, read books, study, sit and let time pass in a place of safety.

It is a place where queer people can come to feel comfortable and cared for at a time when assaults on the trans community are as frequent and violent as they have ever been. As Felix recently told Diva magazine, “We hold space for people on days that might be important for queer related reasons. They don’t necessarily have to talk about it or declare it, but you can be here and we’ll acknowledge and hold that space for you.”

Just as a haircut is more than the simple act of cutting hair, and a hairdresser is more than someone that cuts that hair, so too a barbershop or a salon is, for so many people, a more important part of their life than its basic function might suggest. There is no other space quite like it. It is a place of community and belonging. A space of tenderness. A soft place in an often-hard world. A place of continuity at a time of relentless and exhausting change.

In a world of increasing automation and atomisation, when so many of our encounters are mediated by computers and the internet, there is something incredibly comforting for a lot of people about the fact that the basic process of having our hair cut has changed so little over time. That we still sit now, in the shade maybe or by the warmth of a fire, feeling the sharp blade moving close to our soft skin, talking or perhaps not talking, but trusting enough to know that we are safe, that we are being looked after.

*

Susana’s scissors are stuttering their way around my head now, the shorn hair collecting in the folds of my cape like mountain snow. As she works she gently tilts my head into the position she requires, like she’s rearranging flowers in a vase. With the rest of my body concealed under a long black cape I am nothing but a bobbing head, tilting obediently one way and then another.

There are very few situations in which I so freely give up my bodily autonomy. As we grow up, most of us are taught, quite reasonably and rightly, that our bodies are our own. The politics of who is allowed to touch us, to manipulate us, is fraught and complex and has only grown more so over time. To manipulate once meant simply to skilfully handle objects (such as a human head, perhaps), but since the nineteenth century it has also, in relation to people, taken on a more negative meaning: to covertly influence or exploit. Are we now more prone to see bad intentions in any attempt to manipulate us, physically or otherwise? As we have grown more cognisant of the historic abuses of people’s bodily autonomy, the visible and invisible violence that scars our relationships to one another, have we become less trusting of the way people touch us, move us, manipulate us?

A good hairdresser, a hairdresser we trust, is one of the few people in the world we allow to manipulate us. We trust their good intentions, their training, their character. Perhaps we even see in them the residue of those centuries-old practices of caregiving and healing. And having this space, where we are safely touched and moved and repositioned, is good, healthy even. Physical touch has been linked to lower blood pressure, higher oxytocin levels, and better sleep. But more than this, giving yourself up to somebody else’s authority for a while, allowing your whole body to be under their control, demands a kind of trust that in today’s world feels radical. Such trust, written deep into the flesh and bone of our bodies, is a valuable kind of refuge from the suspicion, cynicism, and outright fakery that defines so many of our encounters with each other in the digital space, where manipulation through spam emails, “fake news,” and social media grifters is never more than a click or two away.