home hairdresser

I had my hair cut this morning in somebody else's kitchen.  It was a perfectly nice kitchen, with a swivel office chair doing duty for a salon chair, and a pine framed bedroom mirror propped against a worktop to provide me with a reassuring view of the work in progress.  Wasted, in my case, since all I can ever see without my glasses is a pale blurry oval topped with two dark smudges for eyes, topped with greyish fuzz.  I had remembered to wash my hair in the shower before visiting the kitchen, so didn't have to have it washed kneeling in front of somebody else's bath.

I have not taken to home hairdressing, though that is normally done in the customer's own home and not a strange one the other side of Colchester, and nor has my hairdresser, or at least not on a permanent basis.  She rang me a couple of days after Christmas sounding slightly fraught, to say that the owner of the salon where she has worked for over twenty years had closed it down.  This was not the best news for her to receive on Boxing Day, but she had thought for a while that something was afoot, and was finally going to take the plunge and open her own salon.  So she hoped I would stay with her, but in the meantime given that I was booked for a cut early in the New Year, would I mind having my hair cut in her house?

Besides my hairdresser, one of the other senior stylists had worked there for nearly a quarter of a century, and a couple of the younger ones had been there ever since leaving school.  They are going to reform the band, though with my hairdresser's name on the lease, as soon as their new premises, which are not currently a hairdressing salon, have been fitted out with chairs and basins and all the other paraphernalia you need to run a hairdressers, like a credit card machine and a booking system.  It is being furnished with antique pine cupboards instead of chrome and my hairdresser is on the hunt for a chandelier, aiming at a style described as retro shabby chic, which sounds just the thing for a shabby chic middle aged bohemian such as myself.  But anyway, my hairdresser is extremely good at doing my hair and frankly, if she wanted to paint the walls lime green and magenta and plaster them with Joey Essex posters I wouldn't mind, as long as I got my hair cut.

In the meantime the kitchen hair salon worked perfectly well, and with free on-street parking.  My hairdresser said, though, that it confirmed that she didn't want to be a home hairdresser.  She missed her colleagues, and the buzz of the salon, and being inside her own house for that many hours a day was oppressive.  Roll on the opening party, to which all clients would be invited.

It is really not a very nice thing to do to text all your staff on Boxing Day to say that the business is closing with immediate effect, especially when they have all worked their socks off through December.  The run up to Christmas is the peak season for hairdressing as people want to look their best for the party season.  That is probably one reason why the owner closed it then, rake in the peak cashflow and then axe the overheads before the post Christmas quiet period.  And maybe the lease had come to a break point.  Who knows?  Still, as my hairdresser said, the end of one thing is the beginning of something else.  She deserves to do well in her new venture, and my guess is that she will.