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:: Thursday, May 10, 2007 ::

Cut Throat

Mrs P and I are off to the Civil Ceremony of an old school friend of mine tomorrow. Its at the Theatre Royal in Bath and is theatrical fancy dress!



As well as the potential for meeting up with old school friends I'm really looking forward to seeing how people turn up. I've bought a feathered mask thing and Mrs P has had a matching feather arrangement made for her hair. She then used it as an excuse to buy a new jacket. (She's already known as the Imelda Marcos of coats.) I've used it as an opportunity to try something I've always fancied and had a cut throat shave.

This is not something to be taken lightly. I haven't been in a barbers shop since I left school 13 years ago. It was then I started growing my hair and took to asking anyone I trusted with a pair of scissors to trim in now and again; this included among others the future mother-in-law, the future bridesmaid, one of my cousins, and an art student I worked with. (This is a prime opportunity to make an incest joke about them all being the same person, but they aren't, ok.) After nearly ten years of this I was thinning too much to be able to carry long hair anymore and I got my brother to shave it all off for me. 20 quid investment in clippers saved me years more spending on barbers. After ten years together I eventually entrusted hair-cutting duties to Mrs P, and after a few bodged attempts and with only the occasional slip she's been doing a reasonable job of it.

As the beard has come and gone with the seasons I've often wondered what a good old-fashioned cutthroat shave would feel like. Reputably it's amazingly close and lasts for days so as someone who is too lazy to wet shave – and in the winter too lazy to shave at all – I've always found this idea fascinating. So at lunchtime today I wondered up to St Nicks, and after meeting Parasite who paid on the nail for the gig last week, ventured into Kamuran's Barber Shop on All Saints Lane.

I flicked through a well thumbed copy of FHM as I waited in this only distantly familiar manly environment, watching the scissor clock hands ticking along and eyeing the huge collection of razors dominating the far wall, like a macabre celebration of butchery.

A quick and efficient hair trim later and I find my head leaning back, a towel wrapped round my collar, and I'm getting whipped around the face with the bushiest clump of badger hair I've seen outside of a badger. A light green paste was then squeezed over my face, I couldn't quite identify the smell but I couldn't help but suspect it was cheep toothpaste. Another brush, soaked in hot water, was then used to work this in a lather, before the knife was produced. I'd like to describe the metallic ringing sound worthy of Hollywood swordplay as it was unsheathed, the hypnotic rhythmic scraping as it was sharpened on an equally dangerous looking leather strap, the sparking flashes of reflective light as the blade cut through the air, but none of these things happened. I guess that was my overly romantic vision of the act.

Yet I was not disappointed with the experience. There is a section in Homage to Catalonia where Orwell does his best to describe the sensation of being shot. He is aware it is an unusual experience that you are not best place to analyse at the time it happens. He has the advantage however that the great majority of his readers will not have lived through the same experience and so will take his word for how it feels. Here, I am in the opposite situation, where I am attempting to describe something that is equally alien to me but in all probability intimately familiar to a good proportion of my readers. (Small and disparate group that you are.) With this in mind I'll not over burden you with information.

Within a few minutes of feeling the first stroke of the fetishised blade and freezing cold hands against my virgin throat I had settled into the process enough to start to find it relaxing. I never expected to be comfortably near to sleep whilst a stranger was wielding a blade at my throat, but I was. There were a couple of moments where I felt the need to swallow when he was working near my adams apple, which was difficult to fight but the moment was picked carefully and I escaped without bloodshed.

A particularly memorable moment came when he needed to attack my upper lip and to do so felt the need reach round from behind me, stick two fingers up my nose, and pull my head back. It brought to mind some unusual and unpleasant specialist tool that I won't link to here. In the interest of research I have tried several combinations of search terms and have found that if you Google Image Search for "nose bondage" you'll get a good idea how it felt.

Several particularly stubborn areas required multiple returns to the warm lather, now stinging slightly, before scraping at with the blade. By the end I suspect he had substituted the toothpaste for concentrated lemon juice. I then got gently slapped about, patted may be a better word for it, with a liberal amount of aftershave, and then a hot towel was applied. (Or were those last two things the other way around?)

Regardless, the whole process was interesting, invigorating and refreshing. On the negative side I'm not buying the part about it being a shave that last for days. My hair grows too damn fast and I already suspect I will be shaving again as normal in the morning.

Labels: Personal

:: Dan 10.5.07 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Comments:

What a damn good post! I wonder if they'd do my legs for me...

# posted by  Natali : 10/5/07 10:42 PM

 

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