by Tim Moore
St Helens has been decreed ‘the most traditionally British urban area’, on the grounds that in our last national census its residents ticked the ‘Christian’ and ‘White British’ boxes in unrivalled droves. On a misty Saturday noon Westfield Street certainly had a flat-capped feel to it, a coal-smutted parade of run-down old shops encircled by the gleaming retail dreadnoughts of Asda, Comet and the rest. Its pavements were sparsely populated by aimless, blotchy-faced men sucking the life out of their fags, and its walls studded with shabby and deflating pronouncements: PART-WORN TYRES FOR SALE; NO FLY TIPPING; LEASE FOR ASSIGNMENT; TOILETS CLOSED DUE TO CONSTANT VANDALISM. Through a backdrop of lingering fog I could just make out the chimneys of Pilkington’s, final survivor of the half-dozen glassmaking plants that once defined the local economy. In the 1970s, these pumped out such huge volumes of hot water that St Helens’ canals supported several species of tropical fish and a healthy colony of terrapins. I suspected that today they’d be frozen over. Once again I looked around at the post-industrial superstore colonies and tried to understand how Britain sustained itself, when all the places where we used to make stuff were now devoted to buying stuff. I remembered the archive films I’d seen at Hull’s Maritime Museum, and the fruity, cocksure newsreel voiceover as flat-capped dockers shovelled up wheat: ‘England is the very model of an import–export economy. We buy our grain from abroad, and pay for it with manufactures.’ That seemed to make sense. What I’d seen in modern Hull and almost every town since absolutely didn’t. How could we keep on consuming more and more while producing less and less? I felt myself suddenly weighed down with impending doom: a man who fears for his children’s future, and is about to have a really terrible haircut.
Pawnbrokers, tanning salons and grimy, garish takeaways: all the usual commercial suspects were present and correct. Sandwiched between examples of the last two sat a little brick edifice, its tatty gold awning slung over a sign that read: AVANTI HAIR TEAM. Beneath this and a phone number ran the legend, THE SALON WITH NATIONAL AWARDS IN HAIR FASHION. My eyebrows disappeared behind a fringe that would shortly be no more: it seemed a tremendously bold description of the proprietor’s triumph in a Channel 5 quest entitled Britain’s Worst Hairdresser. ‘Appointments not always necessary,’ said a note on the front door. I pushed it open and walked in.
As a man of middle years, I consider it my duty to regard most developments in popular culture with alarm and bewilderment. It’s not a big ask: I find myself at a moment in history where public display of lavish swathes of underpant and buttock flesh is a coveted young look, rather than a scene from some Freudian anxiety nightmare whose mere memory compels the victim to see out the balance of adolescence locked in their bedroom in a foetal clench of shame. But more inexplicable to me than this, more than even sports utility vehicles or the unstoppable rise of the tattoo, is the British public’s ratcheting desperation to appear on television. We appear to have reached a stage where absolutely any humiliation, personal or professional, is worth enduring if the reward is a fleeting moment on one of the 19,400 channels currently available on Freeview alone. There is no pale left to go beyond; I honestly cannot think of a title that might deter either TV commissioning executives or the volunteering public. Britain’s Ugliest Dunce. Britain’s Drunkest Dentist. Britain’s Deadest Dog.
I recently watched a programme on intimate surgery in which patients gladly disrobed for full-frontal before and after interviews: no pixellated faces, no distorted voices, no PLEASE JUST KILL ME NOW etched in blood across foreheads. One man seemed especially eager to show his relations, friends, work colleagues and fellow Britons what had previously been hidden, even from him, by a pendulous flap of ‘pubic apron’: a tiny button-mushroom nubbin of penile tissue.
Anyway, John Beirne was a hairdresser, an experienced professional hairdresser, who in 2005, without inducement, threat or deception, offered himself to a TV production team for inclusion in a Channel 5 show which – let us just remind ourselves – was entitled Britain’s Worst Hairdresser. I have to report here that I missed the broadcast – it clashed with Christ, I Stink on Sky 11 – and failed to track down a recording. (The revelation that the show was hosted by Quentin Willson, who is a little irksome and almost entirely bald, may have sapped my investigative enthusiasm.) What I did gather, from generally sympathetic coverage in the local papers, was that John’s success had been less to do with any technical shortcomings than his ‘repertoire of withering put-downs and a tongue as sharp as his scissors’. At one point he told the show’s judge that she looked good for her age, ‘considering you’ve been dead for three weeks’.
The salon was the size of a small studio flat, made smaller by its border of chairs and basins. The chequered floor tiles were lightly bestrewn with hair; tinny hits of yesteryear issued forth from a radio on the reception desk. Two women were at work: a junior stylist stood twisting bits of foil into an old woman’s scalp, while a more senior colleague snipped tenderly away at the gingery curls of a toddler, wide-eyed and rigid in his father’s lap. I took a seat by the door and waited. On cue a middle-aged man with short, spiky and rather aubergine hair strode briskly in through a door at the back of the salon and installed himself at the reception desk in a proprietorial and excitingly ill-tempered manner. He flung open the appointments book and tutted all over it, then slammed it shut and huffed at the ceiling. I raised myself slightly off my chair and let out one of the vague preludial mumbles available from an extensive repertoire. The effect on Britain’s worst hairdresser was immediate. He wheeled round, glowered imperiously down at me, then grabbed a coat from the peg by the door and with a whoosh and a slam disappeared into the misty street.
‘That’s him gone for the day,’ murmured the junior stylist without looking up from her work. Here we go again, I thought. Eyes on the rusty prize, watching it once more snatched away at the last. Could I walk out now, without looking rude or weird? I was weighing it up when the ginger child, still stiff with terror, was carried out past me, tucked under his father’s arm like a small surfboard. The oldest present member of the Avanti Hair Team turned to me and proffered an expectant hand at her now vacant chair. I’d come for a bad job; might as well make the best of it.
As someone who really hates having their hair cut – the stilted banter, the spiny offcuts down the back of the neck, the nagging conviction that with three mirrors and a slightly longer right arm I could be doing it myself for free – my tonsorial service regime is a strictly binary affair. Every eight months I go into the barber’s looking like James May might if he brushed his hair with a balloon, and come out of it close-shorn in a style my wife has compared to a covered button.
Cut all of my hair off, please: it should be a straightforward process. But it never is, because although I’ve been to the same barber for almost ten years, he still plainly has no idea who I am, and greets my simple and unchanging request with considerably more bewilderment than it merits. It is one of my fondest wishes to patronise an establishment, any establishment, that I can go into and ask for the usual, but it’s not going to happen there. Frankly, unless a shop selling nothing but big bags of cheap crap opens up down the road, it’s not going to happen anywhere.
‘Half an inch long all over,’ I say every time, and every time he asks if I mean to take off half an inch, and I correct him, and then I look up at the mirror and see something close to panic pass across his face. Because my regular barber only really knows how to do one haircut, a style prevalent in the land of his birth in the troubled era that he departed it. His every reflex flick of comb and snip of scissor is made with but one archetype in mind, and which I’ve since seen immortalised on a great many black-and-white heads at the Museum of Occupation overlooking Famagusta: a 1970s Cypriot schoolboy.
Anyway, this time it was going to be different – and obviously better, with Britain’s worst hairdresser now out of the picture. ‘What’s it to be then, love?’ asked the stylist, draping a plastic shroud around me and fastening i
ts Velcro strap behind my neck. Together we looked in the mirror at a head weighed down by eight – in fact nine – months’ worth of grizzled haystack. I figured I might as well say what I’d intended to say to her absent boss. ‘Up to you. Whatever you think will suit me.’
Liberated by these words, and soothed by the salon’s cocooning warmth and the low monotone of my stylist’s small talk, I eased back into the chair. The stylist’s fingers fluffed and tugged my overgrown busby into some sort of order, then with practised ease she began to snip away at it. If I was ever going to enjoy an experience that involved bits of me being cut off, it would be now. ‘Just taking some of the weight out and layering things in a bit at the back and sides,’ she said, her hands almost a blur in the mirror as a cascade of shorn locks slid down my gown. ‘So what you doing in Sinellens?’
I blew hair out of my eyes and looked in the mirror. Curious things were happening, and happening fast. A rogue shelf of hair leapt free from my left temple, and I could see a patch of scalp just above the opposite ear.
‘I’m, er, just kind of looking around and doing things.’
‘Oh, right.’
On she snipped, fashioning a wallpaper-brush fringe with a single drastic thwick, then busily eradicating any vestige of symmetry from the curtains that flanked it. I watched my reflection settle into the now familiar blend of horror and exhilaration – the face of a man who has gone in search of the truly dreadful, and found it. ‘Of course, John’s big into his competitions,’ I heard her say at one point, which should have been my cue for some artful probing. If it had, I’d have discovered that John Beirne has in fact won over three hundred awards for being good at cutting hair, but by then I was transfixed into silence. What had until recently been a head of hair was now something else – a helmet made out of old cats. And very badly made. The whole of one ear stood out proud and free, while the other skulked unseen beneath a silver-tabby side-flap. Tufts and clumps erupted at will from the lopsided crown.
‘There you go. How’s that?’
I swivelled my head from side to side in the mirror, raising a hand to pull a slab of neighbouring hair over the lateral scalp-patch.
‘What in the name of Mr Keith Harris have you done to me?’ I wailed passionately, in my head. ‘Absolutely perfect,’ said my mouth.
‘Want any product on it?’
She waved her scissors at the bottles and tubs of styling gels and unguents lined luridly up beneath the mirror. A hundred sticky ways of making everything much, much worse.
‘Lots,’ I said. Five minutes later I walked outside wearing a crested grebe plucked from an oil slick.
I followed a pylon-flanked dual carriageway towards Liverpool, the Irish Sea glinting behind its distant skyline as the sun dispersed the last wisps of fog. It’s a city that boasts an impressive portfolio of urban tribulations, and I expected to find most of them showcased in the metropolitan borough of Knowsley, a feature of the Location, Trumpet, Brantub bottom ten. The Future is KNOWsley! shouted a huge hoarding by the road, which was a promising start. I’d come to understand that the most strident regeneration slogans took a city’s true plight and turned it completely on its head, so that when Hull declared itself Stepping Up, you knew it was actually falling down, and instead of Moving Forward, Middlesbrough kept sliding back. ‘The Past was THENsley!’ I cried, above the distressing sound of Joe Strummer finding out that he couldn’t write songs without Mick Jones.
But the Knowsley Ozzy led me to was an entirely unobjectionable village set in greenery some way outside the city. No matter how hard I stared at the hefty Victorian church it doggedly refused to turn into a derelict factory, and the pensioners seated in neat rows at the bus shelters didn’t look like they’d be resuming a brutal turf war as soon as I was round the corner. So I flicked Ozzy off and aimed Craig towards the largest concentration of close-packed roofs, which as later geographical enquiries revealed took me almost immediately out of the challenged borough.
Knowsley’s evasion seemed somehow typical of Liverpool, a haughty and insular city that you sense would happily cut itself off entirely, reluctantly emerging every few years to show the outside world how to play football or popular music. Without wishing to come over all Boris Johnson – there’s a phrase you don’t want to get wrong – I find Liverpudlians rather a contrary bunch. The default civic mentality is a strange blend of chippiness and superiority: most Scousers feel desperately hard done by, even as they’re belittling their own neighbours with casual disdain. Southport and St Helens might both lie within Merseyside, but by virtue of falling outside the tight and rigidly defined borders of Scouseland, the residents of each and all points between are sneeringly derided as ‘woollybacks’, a nickname that dates back to the days when Lancastrian shepherds arrived in Liverpool’s markets toting fleeces on their shoulders. (Though I do accept that it is quite funny.)
In a civic delusion that today, with Beatlemania and Bill Shankly now distant memories, seems at best curious, Liverpudlians remain quite convinced that it is the secret and dearest wish of every world citizen to have been born a Scouser. To keep these wannabe billions at bay they’ve had to install a number of metaphorical barriers to entry. Some, viz the woolly-back belt, are geographic: residents of the Wirral – an area comfortably within Liverpool’s metropolitan area as it’s demarcated on the maps – are dismissed as ‘plastic Scousers’, or just ‘plazzies’, for living on the wrong bank of the Mersey. It’s a bit like the appellation contrôlée system, but with pot-smoking layabouts in grubby sportswear instead of fine French wines. And some are linguistic: when I stopped for petrol halfway from St Helens, with Liverpool already a blatant presence on the horizon, the till attendant and everyone in her queue spoke flat, straight Lancastrian – not even a hint of the mile-a-minute, phlegm-rattling singalong that would assail my ears just up the road. There’s no dialectical overlap, no halfway Scouse. It’s apartheid by tongue.
That afternoon, driven to despair by the synthesised brass blunderings of The Clash in their death throes, I listened to a lot of BBC Radio Merseyside, and discovered two things. Firstly, that in contravention of the BBC’s much declaimed stance on deregionalised, equal-geographic-opportunity, no one without a very strong native accent is allowed behind a Radio Merseyside microphone. Secondly, despite the evident and clearly audible assumption amongst those blessed with this accent that simple possession of it imbues everything they say with a cheeky-chappy, streetwise wit, it really, really doesn’t. This may partly explain the very poor opinion of the city and its residents I appear to be expressing here. The rest is down to a simple and unedifying desire to get some retaliation in first, for I now became gradually aware, via road signs, shop fronts and community halls, that I had strayed into the scally badlands.
Croxteth and Norris Green: two places nationally synonymous with deadly territorial feuding. Crocky and Nogzy: their local nicknames, two deeply guttural utterances guaranteed to have a Scouser hacking his tonsils right out onto the pavement. A good old grudge falls right in the sweet-spot of Liverpool’s personality matrix, the one with sentimental, never-walk-alone tribalism up one axis and aggrieved, no-surrender stroppiness along the other. Ask a Scouser to bury the hatchet and he’ll immediately oblige, deep into your radiator grille. So when these insatiable bearers of enmity reached vendetta saturation point – not a town, national newspaper or football club left in the land that they didn’t already hate for ever – they had no choice but to turn on each other. Hence the ridiculous and tragic Nogzy/Crocky feud, a long running battle for ‘respect’ fought between neighbouring gangs of crop-haired junior Rooneys on stolen mountain bikes. Tragic because it culminated in a completely innocent small boy being shot dead in a pub car park, and ridiculous because – as I now discovered – these badlands weren’t at all bad. No smouldering mattresses on the pavement, no wheelless wrecks on bricks, not even a single boarded-up house – just street after quiet and well-kept street of Forties and Fifties council terraces, each
with a freshly washed car on the crazy paving. Every hedge was clipped square, and every wheelie bin – each household had three of each, in a range of exciting fashion colours – stood in geometric alignment. The lavish areas of parkland were trimmed and attractive, bearing no relation to the churned and needle-strewn joyriding arenas of my imagination.
Put together, Croxteth and Norris Green would form one of the world’s largest council estates, but here there were none of the many environmental inducements to anti-social behaviour that characterised the likes of Bransholme in Hull, or in fact half the streets in half the towns I’d been through. There was deprivation, of course – the estates were built to house workers at a huge English Electric factory whose demolished remains I’d driven past on the way in – but really, for the gang-affiliated youth of these areas to carry on like nothing-to-live-for South Central desperadoes is frankly embarrassing. I might even have told them as much had they been about, but as luck would have it the entire neighbourhood was currently just up the road at Goodison Park – partly to support Everton FC, but mainly to heap abuse upon Manchester United in general and Crocky-reared traitor Wayne Rooney in particular.
Soothed by afternoon sun and a deep purging of pent-up Scousophobia, I drove under the Mersey with a smile and a whistle – an incompatible demeanour for an unwashed man with a terrible museum and a filthy beach to visit. But contrary to every indication on the Wirral Borough Council website, and indeed the stubborn insistence of the plazzie-Scouser desk sergeant on duty at a police station directly opposite, I found the Wirral Museum closed, and keeping its ‘laughable mess of random artefacts’ very much to itself. In fact I’ve just discovered – the Maestro-driving Angel of Death had struck once more – that its scattergun exhibits (think mayoral chains of office draped over Viking blankets) will never again see the light of day.