A couple of days ago I had a haircut.

As I grew through most of my hair during my thirties, you may wonder why that sentence is so significant to me. (Apart from the fact that if you have it cut to 2mm, when it grows another millimetre, that’s a 50% increase – so how many of you blokes leave it until you have half as much hair again to deal with?)

It’s because I figured out many, many years ago that the barbers’ is a magical place, and if it’s a good one, you exit feeling that something magical has happened.

You are being served

Like Terry Pratchett’s library L-Space, I like to think that barbers also occupy a slightly different niche in space-time – call it Hair Space. All proper barbers everywhere have an indefinable look about them, so that you can’t tell if they were built during any one of the past ten or so decades. They’re all a little bit deco, or is it fifties snazz, maybe fin-de-siècle… or sort of seventies kitsch. The thing is, the harder you look, the more it seems that the space is just the same as all of the others. And it’s true: all real barber shops are connected through a sub-atomic space-time wormy-type thingummy, holding the whole universe together.

My earliest memory of going to the barber’s was when I was about eight, I think. I was sent up the road to the usual place, about 400 yards/metres away, to get my ‘short-back-and-sides’ (how I looked forward to being old enough to get a ‘college boy’… stop smirking: more innocent times… more innocent me, anyway). Off I trundled and in I stumbled… to be confronted with the Demon Barber of Albany Road.

Since my last monthly visit – followed by days of scratching – the place had been taken over by new management. That is, a new management whose last position was in the Hammer House of Horror. Much to the supposed delight of the clientele who were not eight years old and of an impressionable disposition, the place had been kitted out with macabre signs and grizzly decorations, turning my usual boring haircut session into a confrontation with evil itself.

‘Throats cut at no extra charge’; ‘Best prices paid for scalps’; ‘VERY short back and sides’ (with cartoon of beheaded victim); ‘Blood letting a speciality’… and silly stuff like that. Try telling my eight year old self it was silly – I was out of there within three minutes, running like the clappers for the safety of home. When asked why I hadn’t had a haircut, I said nonchalantly (or so I thought) that the barbers was closed.

My kind uncle said, “Come on, I’ll go and have a look with you,” obviously aware that something was up. Having gotten through the childish bright red embarrassment of having the whole place laughing at me, I did figure out then that the barbers was really a very special place – a place where men were at ease with the idea of sharing something pleasurable, and from then on, I slowly came round to the idea that I might share that feeling.

So it was, and so it is, wherever and whenever…

Since then I have had just the one barber while I was in London – hello Michael – that is, for around thirty years. We both went through a lot during that time, chatting through life’s crap and joy while nursing my increasing baldness to its inevitable conclusion: not-quite-baldness. And lots of whiteness.

Here in Brussels I have found the perfect barber, Coiffure Marc. Nothing much to say: they say good morning Mr Bob when I arrive, brush me down and help me on with my jacket when I leave, and spend the middle half hour making me feel a million euros.

Apart, of course, from the awful dread of the half-way haircut. There’s a point where the barber has got about five minutes around my bonce, when I think about the movies. You know, when the gangster/cowboy is sitting in the barber’s chair, halfway through a haircut or shave, when suddenly there’s shooting and stuff going on outside. He brushes the barber aside, grabs a towel to wipe his face and hurtles out to make mayhem… so how come he doesn’t have half a haircut? Scary stuff.

I did find it relatively easy to find a great local barber, as my years of experience gave me an edge. That is, my years of experience in finding barbers in foreign places. Most men make the crucial mistake of getting a haircut before they go away on holiday or business. Not me: I make it one of my little adventures to pootle off and find a local barber.

Of course, I always end up in what is essentially the same place: Hair Space.