Jonny McCambridge: A curious case of hairy Stockholm Syndrome

It has sort of become my calling card over the years (along with skin which burns at the merest exposure to the sun, being unable to sustain a conversation for any length of time with other adults and ripping the backside out of my trousers every time I bend over), and I’ve never before encountered any reason to change.

In photographs of me as a youth I always had tightly-cropped locks, apart from one short and regrettable period in my teens when I attempted to grow a pony-tail (photographic evidence exists but will not be shared here).

Short hair was a style borne of practicality, rather than any fashion considerations. It was just easier to manage. My own mop, if given the chance to sprout, becomes thick, dense and as easy to navigate as the Amazonian rainforest. Thus, short was best.

I took this to extremes in my early 20s. Unemployment and the penury which accompanied it forced me to abandon barber shops altogether and purchase a set of home hair-clippers. Every Friday I would lay newspapers on the ground and shave my head all over with the ‘Number 1’ blade.

I maintained this ‘skinhead’ look for several years and the severity of the style (along with the aforementioned conversational issues) may go some way towards explaining my historical lack of success in meeting nice girls.

As it was, my hair was still frighteningly short when I met my current wife (who is nice). This, along with the fact that my front two teeth then were broken stumps and my tendency towards wearing clothes which were several sizes too big, may lead the reader to conclude that it is a miracle that I got married at all.

The accepted narrative is that my wife introduced taste and civilisation into my habits. That’s certainly my recollection of events (although when I look back on our wedding photos I’m still surprised by the austerity of my barnet).

Years of married life have mellowed me, both in temperament and in hairstyle. As I have slipped contentedly into middle age and my locks have turned snowy white I have favoured the cut which is displayed in my byline pic at the top of this page - a little bit of growth, but still neat and tidy.

On occasion I have toyed with the idea of letting the mane flourish but I am constantly betrayed by impatience and the strangely addictive lure of the barber’s buzzing shears running clean lines up the back of my skull while depositing thick clumps of grey wool on the hard floor.

Besides, many mornings I have watched my wife wrestle for hours with hair-dryers and straighteners, while mumbling quietly to myself ‘That’s no life’.

Which is why lockdown, and the closure of barber shops, hit me hard. Usually I get my hair cut every four weeks. Deprivation, at first, made me miserable and irritable.

My thick mop quickly became the predictable unmanageable mess. I have hair which does not so much grow as expand like boiling milk in a saucepan. Pretty soon I was walking around with what looked like a giant mushroom atop my head.

I tried applying gel but my son’s tendency to surprise me by jumping on my skull at unexpected moments, made this messy and impractical. Then, for several weeks, I took to wearing a hat indoors, which often brought bemused looks from my work colleagues in our daily video conferences. I was glad that lockdown meant I could not leave the house very often because I disliked my hairstyle. Essentially, I became a prisoner to my own hair.

Early on I had determined that I would be forced to, once again, cut it myself. I own a beard trimmer which I assumed would be adequate for the job. In my mind I had already part-composed the column I would write about making a hash out of home hairdressing with the accompanying hilarious photograph showing me with the appearance of a hastily sheared sheep.

But the weeks passed and, for some reason, I never got round to doing it. Then a strange alteration began to occur. I stopped wearing the hat and I gradually found that I did not mind my overgrown hair so much, then I moved to not much caring how I looked, until finally I discovered that I actually began to like it. I went from resistance to acceptance to approval. If previously I had felt imprisoned by my hair, now it seemed that I had developed a strange case of hirsute Stockholm Syndrome.

I became fascinated by my now flowing locks and started to notice the similar appearance of others. At our morning conference when I am supposed to discuss ideas for news stories with august and totemic figures such as Ben Lowry and Sam McBride, I instead found my thoughts wandering to the state of their unkempt, overgrown manes.

Part of my job is writing down important things that they say. Now I find when I look back in my notebook it contains gems such as ‘IMPORTANT: Remember to ask Sam what shampoo he uses’.

And so, while my hair currently could not be described as long, it is certainly longer than it has ever been. Definitely long and thick enough to lose a comb or to conceal a small animal. My wife tells me that I look like a faded, former member of a 1980s boy band who is refusing to let go of the past. I am not sure if this is a compliment.

There is even a curiosity within me now as to what it would be like if I never got my hair cut again. A stirring instinct that this furry, matted adventure must continue. I have just discovered for the first time that my hair is not entirely straight, but rather that the strands are wavy and meander in odd directions when allowed to express themselves. I want to know where it is that they intend to go.

Perhaps my hair has become a metaphor for my life in my 40s, continuing to grow and stretching out into unexplored areas as part of a daring, experimental future.

Or I may just be over-thinking things.