Hair-raising exploits down the years

When I was a child cutting my hair was not an option. I was the daughter whose hair grew until I could sit on it and who had to endure having it plaited into two snaking braids every morning.

My sister got the severe fringed bob that you could run a comb through once a day.

She had the better hair — thicker, wavier, less fine than mine — but I was the one lumbered with the high-maintenance hairdo.

There were no choices and it didn’t occur to me to ask why. It was a different time and no social media informing us of the millions of ways things could be.

Nowadays, children hit the hair salon when they are toddlers needing a trim, but we had a granny with a pair of metal sewing scissors and questionable eyesight and so the first time I darkened a hairdresser’s door was when I was 15 and ready to part with the long tresses.

I wanted flicks. Those hacked off bits on either side of the forehead. I wanted what Abba’s Agnetha Fältskog had.

Truth be told, I wanted a lot of what she had, but this is a story about hair.

The only way I could afford my first real cut was to find a hair stylist in training in a high-rise building in downtown Cape Town and he snipped my hair shorter, added the much-desired flicks and then blow-dried it into 1980 teen perfection.

I took myself and my new do straight to the pharmacy for a mugshot for my impending ID book and it graced that page for years to come. How cool was I with flicks to flick.

If only I’d left well enough alone. But no. It was the era of The Perm. The decade of Big Hair. And I, with my straight, fine hair signed right up for it.

I’d suffered the indignity of flat hair at my matric dance and every party required me to spend ages frying my limp locks in sizzling hair tongs.

The perm was going to improve my life at Rhodes University.

And I said it did. After just one afternoon in skinny curlers and noxious, headache-inducing perm lotion I looked like a shaggy sheepdog which was absolutely not the look I was going for.

No, to achieve the all-important volume and height I had to deploy my screamy “travel” hairdryer and blast in the Farah Fawcett flicks.

Looking back at the early ’80s student photos gives me hair regret, but I can’t be the only one.

Grey hairs began to poke their way through my hair shafts when I was in my thirties and so began the era of the root tint.

No longer was I colouring my hair to sport a cute but temporary flash of auburn which would wash out until the next time I felt like a small appearance change. No, this became a monthly chore.

Visiting the hair salon was no longer a bi-annual treat.

As all my hair turned to grey I became very well acquainted with my East London hairdresser and her many clients and our interactions about everything from psychopaths to sewerage often became more raucous than a Friday night at the pub.

The trendy salon was situated in the same building as an elegant beauty spa.

One afternoon, while we were cackling cathartically about something or other, construction workers arrived and installed a chunky door between salon and spa, which made us screech even louder.

We were being muffled! While we’d guffawed and giggled through our appointments we had unintentionally been ruining the serenity of the spa.

When we left East London and resettled in Cape Town, my grey roots and I landed up with a macho hair stylist who applied my tint from the comfort of his coastal hillside home.

He wore a leather apron, played gorgeous music and brought me coffee while my colour took hold.

Then he’d pull up a basin chair to his kitchen sink to wash out the gunky tint.

He would regale me with tales about how he’d love to have been a soldier and about how he once roved Greek beaches cutting sun worshippers’ hair.

His favourite stories were about the clients who he was convinced wanted more from him than just a cut and blow.

My current hair fairy is a wonderful raven-haired woman who plies her trade on an enclosed balcony in a vintage office block.

When I say vintage, I mean you could film a 1960s movie there without having to change a thing.

When I first presented my root regrowth to her, I had to step through a fusty but enchanting second-hand bookshop to enter her tiny space.

An antechamber of sorts, it contained all manner of tomes stacked upon towering wooden bookshelves.

From what I could tell, no-one ever bought any books, but the very elderly owner couldn’t let go of his Harry Potteresque business.

So my hairdresser switched on his lamps and turned on his classical music because he is her landlord and because she is a very kind person.

The bookshop progressively evolved into a beauty parlour. It started with a mobile nail tech who called on the old man to cut his toenails.

The music long gone, I heard “snip, ping” 10 times as his liberated nails zinged across the room and hit shelves, books and mirrors in the tiny room.

These days the books and shelves have been replaced with pink tables and fluffy curtains and a couple of beauticians offer massages and manicures at knockdown prices.

My hairdresser struggles to keep a strict appointment book. She always agrees to a time, but on the day feels compelled to change it.

Come earlier, she texts. Come later. Sometimes she triple books and clients pile up in her mini salon with its unreliable portable geyser, as if there is nowhere else they should rather be.

All is forgiven when her magical hands massage our scalps and she warmly hugs us goodbye. Her retro 2015 rates don’t hurt either.

We bellyache and banter and roar with laughter with people we’ve just met while our roots are restored to the colours of our youth.

The beauty parlour antechamber may not cope with the noise for very much longer. I’m expecting the door guys any day now.

Weekender