It's shear madness: So many barbers, so many bad haircuts

Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen

Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair

– from Hair, the musical.

Here’s a holiday riddle: Why is it that we have never had so many barber shops yet so many bad haircuts?

Is it the fascination with warrior TV shows or movies like Vikings and Mad Max pick a number? There’s this guy on the checkout one day looking like Ragnar in his middle period – facial tattoos, piercings, and one side of his head razored.

Maybe he had a fancy dress party to go to or a mock medieval battle coming up. Or perhaps we’re so post-modern that any sense of era or style has been atomised like everything else.

It’s not just ‘Ragnar’. Everywhere you look, there are half-shaven heads: short, back and no sides; rat’s tails, broccoli heads and all kinds of mullets.

NRL players seem to be the worst. Some look like it’s self-inflicted – and that’s about the kindest observation you can make.

Anyone who says these unsightly looks are hip, cutting edge or the height of fashion is from another planet, or savvy barbers who know that in a couple of weeks, you’ll be back for a maintenance trim.

Listen to your mother. She won’t lie (not about this anyway).

Throughout the shopping malls of Canberra, barber shops have popped up like mushrooms after rain, along with the jewellers, it seems. Cutters stand at the door way touting for business as I walk past and shudder.

Inside are men and boys with next to no hair already being further sharpened or their names or icons being shaved into their scalps like a brand.

How do these shops survive, I wonder, in this never-ending cost-of-living crunch? When I get a haircut, I make it last.

We’ve been through this before. After the glory days of the hirsute 70s came the punks and the electric shock look and mohawks. Even the US Marines’ buzzcut was popular for a time.

It was all bad.

When I was a lad, it was like the court of Louis XIV – luxuriant shoulder-length locks blowing in the wind and ponytails. Free and easy days.

Not that I haven’t had my share of bad haircuts.

My inner hippie meant I wasn’t a dedicated follower of fashion, but every now and then, I’d have it all off with immediate regret and much grief. Samson, I know how it feels.

One impulsive effort was christened the “chewed mango” by the young woman who dutifully kept cutting on my instruction.

At least I didn’t need another cut for a year.

Earlier this year, with a thinning head of hair just a pale shadow of its former glory, I wandered in and said to the girl – look, they all look like teenagers these days – “just tidy it up”, as in do whatever you can to make it look reasonable.

Whenever I see the clippers, I instinctively flinch and decline, but this time I let it slide.

Minutes later, I look in the mirror, and there is more of my face than I care to see and a chill on the back of my neck.

And, OMG, is that a fade?

Then, that old feeling. What have I done?

I walk out into the streams of shoppers in the mall, just another one of those bad haircuts.

Surprisingly, my partner says it was a good cut. Neat. Colleagues offer favourable reviews. Sharp.

They’re lying, of course.

What would Mum say?