Being awarded an OBE should be one of the great achievements of someone’s life, so the mockery surrounding the gong from Boris Johnson for Kelly Jo Dodge, House of Commons hairdresser, is frankly bewildering. If there is anyone in a middle-aged man’s life who deserves an honour it is surely our hairdressers, faced with the conflict of that irresistible force of the receding hairline butting up against the immovable object of our King Canute-like egos.
My hairdresser would be top of my personal honours list. I can’t name her (we shall call her Nadia), because she would not like it and would exact painful revenge upon me in retaliation. Nadia relishes plucking those maddeningly more frequent nose hairs, laughing until she has tears in her eyes as she warns “this is gonna hurt”. She knows more about me than anyone beyond family and my closest friends, and has outlasted a couple of long-term relationships.
Nadia is Iranian, as are most stylists in her salon. The salon is located in a chi-chi area of London, where I lived briefly when I earned several times my current paltry teacher’s salary. As their prices have soared, I should probably find someone cheaper and more local. But I just can’t, not least because she would curse us all to eternal hair hell. My girls, now they are grown up and I no longer pay for them, have “weaned themselves off her”. In reality, they try a variety of cheaper stylists or none at all and return sheepishly to Nadia with bird’s-nest hair and tails between their legs twice a year.
Nadia knows them better than most of my friends, even some family members. She has cut their hair since primary school and still cuts my ex’s hair, but remains sphinx-like in her devotion to client confidentiality.
We all know that we go there, not just for a haircut, but for a lesson in the socioeconomic geopolitics of the Middle East and beyond. My only sadness is how unlikely it appears that we will be able to visit Iran any time soon, such has been her 16 years of waxing lyrical about the place.
Middle-aged men are funny creatures. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all obsessed with our hair. It’s not surprising really, given that whether we garner those “oh, you’re looking good for your age” comments or a polite silence depends so much on the twin signifiers of the hairline and the beer belly. Nadia once told me I was the only client she knew with “an advancing hairline”. I’ve loved her ever since.
Unfortunately, she might mean that hair starts growing out of our nostrils and ears and up our backs as we age. She is too polite to draw too much attention to any of it. Nor does she accept that I am more salt than pepper a la George Clooney these days. Or at least, she doesn’t let on that she knows. She just gets those tweezers out and attacks my nose. Of course she deserves a medal.
