Jeremy Clarke
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Everyone in the shop had been listening with anticipation, respect and appreciation to their sauciest interviewer turning it on for the girls, and everyone laughed, including her. Her laugh was a short sharp shout and very alarming.
It was kind of her to fit me in and I hoped I hadn’t interrupted her lunch, I said. I mustn’t worry, she said. She had finished her sandwich. Not that she ate much anyway. She didn’t need to. She hadn’t room in this body of hers for more than a small sandwich. At which point she snaked her hands sinuously over her body to demonstrate how spare the frame was and how mouse-like the cavities contained within it must be.
She changed the subject to gin. It had plenty of room for that, she said. Oh yes. In fact, gin was all she lived for and she didn’t mind admitting it. Now everyone else in the salon — including a previously mute woman under the drier — suddenly came to life and agreed that they lived for gin too. And when I said that I liked gin, I sensed that my approval rating within the salon had shot up to a virtually unassailable height. There followed an open debate about fruit in gin and tonic. A slice of grapefruit went surprisingly well, I contributed. The interest this aroused was profound and I now sensed that the position of temporary salon philosopher and guru was open to me should I want it.
The rough clippering of the back and sides of my head was now completed. She laid the clippers aside and resumed her work more circumspectly with the scissors.
I was still considering claiming the half-price student discount and I asked her if many students took advantage of Half Price Mondays. The Asian students were the only ones with enough money to spend on their appearance these days, she said. Then she said: ‘But we’ll be alright won’t we, when we leave? We’re always alright in the end, aren’t we?’
In other words she was telling me she was a Brexiteer and we could talk about that next, if I liked. The dog-whistle delicacy of her overture surprised me, given the courage and volume with which she projected her personality and other opinions on to the public stage. And a slight drop in air pressure suggested that she was touching on an issue of consuming interest to all three of the hairdressers, which was second only to gin.
I credited her sophistication by giving an equally oblique answer. And I’m now tired, in any case, of the arguments put up by both sides, which are otiose because ideologically based and fundamentally unbridgeable. I think I said something about the EU project being doomed to failure anyway, whether we stayed or went. But it was a pleasant enough thought that if civil war did break out, we Brexiteers, like the Wehrmacht, would be fighting to the last with smart haircuts.
Because you read about brexit
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