In the one and only ‘fashion’ episode of the Auld Stories newsletter, I relived the moment I was walking down Tottenham Court Road and saw a guy walking towards me. As he got closer to me and my eyes scanned up from his shoes, socks, trousers and I thought to myself ‘Er, look at that fucking pretentious loser.’ My eyes reached the face to reveal that I was looking at my reflection in the Foyles bookshop window.
It was a real ‘life lesson’ for me. It taught me not to judge someone by how they look until I am 1000 thousand per cent sure I am not looking at my own reflection.
In this fashion episode, I am talking about hair. It is something I have touched on before but I felt it was time for a deep dive.
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The main reason I've not popped out a child yet is that I am still to learn all the answers to all the questions the child is likely to ask as they are growing up and collecting life knowledge or for school or whatever other reason children constantly ask questions to make you feel stupid. Make you feel
this big.
Why did the Cold War?
Can you name the periodic table?
Where do puddles come from?
Why don't you have a successful YouTube podcast interviewing entrepreneurs?
And things like that.
I just don't have the answers, so I'm not ready to be a daddy Thom just yet without some thorough revision.
Why do you always wear a hat?
My nephew asks me.
Directly and brutally like only a child can do.
Asked innocently but loaded. Making me sweat and umming and stuttering. Why do I always wear a hat you ask?
Well, I hate the way my hair looks and I can't do anything about it because both my Grandads lost their hair and for some reason, it works that way apparently. You get your Grandads hairline. The conspiracy theories are right. So it's gradually been getting worse through the years and now it is at a point where it's almost gonna look better if I just shave it off because sometimes I look like a mad scientist but without the brains but I have quite a round face so if I shave it all off it's gonna be less Jasons Stathom and more Karl Pilkington. And I used to have such lovely hair and I don't want to say goodbye to it and if I wear a hat then you don't see the receding bits and you might think that I just have a lovely head of hair still and I can't look in the mirror anymore without upsetting myself and why do I wear a hat?
Well, this is why I wear a hat! So I can leave the house. So I can have a conversation with someone without thinking about how horrible my head looks. Is that okay with you? Is that a good enough answer for you!?
I've seen this video on YouTube about how you can rub your fingernails together for 5 minutes every 5 hours then your hair starts growing back but I don't think it works and now my fingernails hurt all the time.
My nephew had moved on to tell me about his new pack of football cards. He wasn't aware of the grenade he'd just unpinned. But he was now gonna have to deal with the cleanup.
Let me tell you, when I was your age I had lovely hair just like you and the thought of wearing a hat all the time was laughable. Let me take you back.....
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I was in year 5 and at that stage of my football career where I wasn’t so much into the scoring and tackling but more into the look, style and swagger of the bigger boys playing for the other team. I was in the penultimate year of primary school (the best years of my life) and we were playing against Brixworth who were like the Barcelona of primary school football in the Daventry area.
A kid playing for Brixworth was called Buzz or Bezz or Beaver or something cool like that. He had a shaved head and then a little curly, tufty bit at the front which was bleached. It was and still is the coolest hairstyle I’ve ever had the pleasure of brushing up against.
When I think of Buzz (or Bezz or Beaver) I imagine him as a full-grown man but he was playing for the school team so I think that was against the rules. But for some reason, he just seemed more fully formed and aware of himself than I did. More comfortable in his own skin
I was being shouted out by my coach Mr. Kinneard and my other teammates to tackle this guy or at least get back and defend and pay attention and I was just watching him and his hair (the front bit) dancing in the wind. I could feel my priorities in life switch in that one moment. I wasn't gonna be a professional footballer, I was gonna be a struggling artist for my whole life and I owe it all to that magical haircut of Buzz or Beaver or Bazzy or whatever his name was.
Needless to say, I rushed straight home and I asked Mum to give me the same haircut as Buzz from Brixworth and she obliged but I wasn't very good at explaining what the style was so I just had the same haircut that I had before but the front of it was bleached.
The teachers at my school weren't even mad I think they were just concerned. So I think they must have all held a focus group and decided to go full out and bleach the whole head of hair.
It was a beautiful feeling. I loved it. It was my first taste of the alternative and I was never going back
Or so I thought. It turns out my hair and style in general through my secondary school years were pretty conservative and by the book.
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When my bleached hair grew out I went natural for a lot of secondary school. You had to make the decision early on about which direction you were gonna go. Gelled up spiky hair/straight up quiff with wet look hair gel or curtains.
You had to decide which way you were gonna go and you had to stick with it for the rest of school or maybe even the rest of your life. Some people managed to make the transition from spiky to curtains or curtains to quiff but it was rare.
I decided to go down the spiky/straight-gelled quiff with wet look hair gel route. It will always be one of the biggest regrets of my life. I was often told I looked like the boy from My Parents Are Aliens
It was one of those comparisons you were not allowed to get offended by because it wasn't like a direct insult it was just an observation and although it definitely was not a compliment and we all knew it, it was to go unchallenged.
My hair troubles took a different turn when I reached sixth form. I now had Luscious, lovely, wavy, highlighted hair. I had a 2-year period before I went to University where I was good-looking.
Before I went to University and realised if I wanted to just eat chips for every meal, every day I could do that and if I wanted to get blackout drunk and angry and upset every night then I could do that too.
But these 2 years before Uni before the chips, trebles for singles, tears and homesickness, I was good-looking and had lovely hair and was fit, but to be honest with you I couldn't take the pressure.
The pressure of being a sex symbol was too much for me at 17/18. I had to stop going outside during school hours unless I was walking to a lesson in a different block. The reason I had to stop going outside was because there was a group of 13-year-old girls who used to follow me and ask for my autograph. They said I looked like the guy from the band Busted. So they weren't actually asking for my autograph, but asking for the guy from Busted's autograph through me.
It was complicated and it was a new form of bullying. Now to you, this might sound like a pretty nice form of bullying but it still WAS bullying and in a way, it's worse because this was a time when the 'Politically correct laws' had just been passed and it was now illegal to even disagree with a 13-year-old girl never mind a gentle shove or kick on the shin.
So I think this is why I spent those years at University basically just self-sabotaging my whole body because I had spent 2 years being good-looking and I couldn't take it.
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By the time I got to London, I was still up and down in the looks department but it's fair to say the hairline was just going one way.
I started wearing hats more and slowly became addicted. Hats were just the gateway drugs to the next stage of headgear.
The headband.
I started wearing headbands at first just when I was drunk and then I started bringing them into my everyday life. I used to say I was the 'white Frank Ocean' because he also went through a stage of wearing headbands. Maybe saying I was the white version of one of the greatest musicians of the 21st century just because I wore a headband was slightly racist or a show of my white privilege but you have to remember I also think I am one of the greatest musicians of the 21st century so the comparison should make a bit more sense to you now and you probably feel very stupid.
I managed to wean myself off the headbands and I went back to hats. But not before ruining many a romantic photo with Rachel and me.
I still bleach my hair from time to time and if I'm feeling very dangerous I'll go out without a hat but if I do then I know I won't be doing any schmoozing or sealing any deals or crunching any numbers with an industry disrupter or writing an opinion piece for Vice. Not with this hair.
It is a tough thing for a man to accept his head hair is vanishing. A bitter pill to swallow.
When my Mum was told she would have to move on to a heavier type of chemo I told her she'd now be able to relate to what I was going through with the hair loss.
She said yeah but at least hers is gonna grow back. One of the many beautiful things about my Mum is that if I ever made a risky joke she would always come back with something wittier and/or double down on it.
She always said I reminded her of her Dad, something I never took that well because I always see myself as a young boy so being told I looked like a 50-year-old man with a receding hairline never sat too well with me, but now of course I find it a comforting thought that I reminded my Mum of Grandad. Ideally, it would have been for the success, money making and work ethic, but I'll take it anyway.
The happy ending to this is that my Dad and Rachel's Dad both have perfect heads of hair so that will bypass me and head straight to my lucky, lucky children. They will still have my anxiety, impatience, passive-aggressive anger issues and a dangerous love for soya sauce but at least they will have their Grandadsesses's thick, lovely hair.
Also, Rachel has such lovely lovely hair too, with a hairline to die for. In fact, Rachel currently has my nearly ideal haircut. I sometimes lay awake staring at her hair just imagining what it would be like on my head. The only difference I'd make is that I'd shave it all to a Number 1 apart from the front where I'd have a little tuft/curly quiff and I'd bleach it and roam around town like the most beautiful boy in Donegal.
Thanks for reading.
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Thom Xx