Short back and sides please

 

Subject: "Short back and sides" please

From "short back and sides" to a "number 4". So one of life's little rituals changes but remains the same. Like a scrubbed and polished Prussian I now emerge from the barber, sorry, the hairdressers into the daylight, shorn of the few wild white hairs which still grow, an indication I am still alive and well !!
The Barber of old was a tradesman not an artist. "Short back and sides"  was an economy of effort and imagination, akin to sheering sheep, carried out with little fuss and bother as was all our toiletries. No creams or gels,  just soap and water, no special plea to make us resemble some screen idol, just the bare minimum. 

Walking away from the shop the cold air found new skin to torment but it was all rather refreshing being brought back to the 'starting gate' as it were, separated from of any pretension to be someone you were not.
In those days we were not in awe of fashion or of trends. We were grounded in our sameness and took comfort that everyone seemed more or less the same. We all seemed to have and want the same things and therefore there was little competition. I can't remember wishing to be a millionaire, there were no lottery route out other than the football pools of which it was acknowledged, at least some sort of prerequisite knowledge was required to give yourself a chance to win.
It was a time when for a boy the simple pleasures of being yourself was enough. The cycling and rock climbing  had their hero's on the Tour de France or the guys who shimmied up sheer rock faces in the Alps. They were masculine god's who linage traced back to our Time Trial on a cold windy morning on the A1 or the rocky outcrop you were climbing in the Dales.
Money never figured in my calculations. If I had enough to do the simple things which we did in those days, it was enough. Some change in my pocket for a pint and a packet of chips was all I asked for and even a holiday was a bargain basement experience. Why travel in a "Hilton bubble" we used to say, people staying in those sort of hotels rarely experienced the delight of mixing with the locals or competing for what was on offer at breakfast with other people drawn from all over the world. Breakfast was in fact often the mainstay throughout the day with a small meal in the evening. Eating was not a ritualistic display with the kudos of knowing which wine to drink, it was a refueling event a sort of touch down before the next flight of fancy.
Cycling through France, nights spent in a tiny canvas tent, sighting the Med and the expectation of Cannes at night  was enough to take us into Monti Carlo (not the casino) and the contrast of the tent  made our experience so much more memorable​.
Today the package holiday, ('eat and drink as much as you can it's all included ) is popular.  Compulsory inoculations to insulate you from the bugs, travel insurance to take care of the rest. This would have been an anathema to us as we set out on an adventure with all its inherent dangers but also with the thrill of knowing the danger was there.

We were not cosseted by regulations and "do gooders". We were not constantly reminded of our responsibility to ourselves, a graze on the nose was rather a reminder to be more careful next time.

Authority was respected, parents, the police, not feared or ridiculed. Authority  had its place in our education, passed down from our parents and supplemented by attitudes within society which acknowledged the order of things, without being enthralled or diminished in any way. People articulated their individuality by understanding the importance they had in ensuring the way society worked and the responsibility for the role we all played in its homogeneity.