U fryzjera

I know. It's a title that makes you fear the worst.

At the weekend, I had a self-grooming 'accident' with the pair of kitchen scissors that I nicked (inadvertently) from my sister's kitchen on the way back from Edinburgh in August.*

An old friend in St Andrews once expressed his bewilderment at the relationship between female emotions and hairstyles (I remember reading something about this in Massolit but I can't remember which section I found it in):

- You want to change your life... so you change... your hair?

he exclaimed, utterly stupefied by the irrationality of it all.


At a certain point mid-way through the weekend, following several litres of Zywiec and one of those disastrous inadvertent networking incidents where you suddenly realise through a boozy haze that the person you are talking to would potentially be an excellent professional contact if you only had a business card on you and if you weren't a good pint or two beyond the point where you are able to make a decent impression in two different foreign languages damn Pauza and its generous barmen...

... at a certain point mid-way through the weekend I decided to rid myself of cumbersome excess keratin by taking the scissors to the stuff. I've always dreamed of doing this and then running away in disguise. It felt good. Even minus the running away part.

The next morning I woke up racked with a nagging sense of some major infraction committed against conventional sanity and with several hundred little salt-mine gnomes hammering away at the back of my right eyeball. I lurched into the bathroom via a decade or two in reverse until I was confronted with 1987 staring back at me from the mirror. Sudden memories of months spent pinning back a growing fringe with hair slides and that achingly trendy velvet padded alice-band at the age of around seven and a half flashed across my consciousness.

To cut a long story short (a boom-ching) it needed sorting out, and fast. A cunningly-arranged bandanna very rapidly ceases to look cool once you reach the office on a Monday morning. Resisting the urge to curl up and dye (groan), I left the house and, with a hop, a snip (oh for heaven's sake) and a jump, presented myself at Jean Louis David on Monday after work.

Now I know, I know that in these chain places they simply look at the card in the brochure and cut your hair like what it's supposed to be in the picture, but I'm simply not ready for some trendy little student salon on Karmelicka or for babcia-driven terror in a tiny traditional place by Nowy Kleparz. I googled 'fryzjer, Kraków' (Google is the translator's best friend) and stumbled across one or two forums, mostly headed 'Kawiarnia'. The reviews were mixed, and in the end it looked as though a chain salon in the centre of town (ul. Szewska) would be the safest bet.
I couldn't work out why all the contributors to the forum talked about 'maszyny' though. Machines? What was all that about?

Shortly I was sitting facing the mirror.

- So, what can we do for you?
- Uhh... I cut my hair** myself (insert 'when drunk' as required) and I don't like it." I admitted. "It's a mess."

The girl nodded and smiled, knowingly.

I have some problems with spatial awareness in Polish. If it's not 'z', it's 'po' or 'przy' or even 'nad', and I can never remember which is which. So when someone says 'Head back' to me in Polish, chances are I'm going to tilt it forwards, up or down or simply turn and stare out of the window.

We proceeded via a trial-and-error approach, until eventually I simply allowed the hairdresser to manipulate my head until it was facing in the right direction.

I have no intention of risking a bikini wax here.

Oh yes, and the 'maszyny'? Electric clippers. Instead of scissors. My ears have never felt so nervous...



*Funny story actually. My suitcase burst, and, in taping it up (if you've never bought electrical tape go out and get some immediately: you have no idea how useful it is - for both practical and cosmetic purposes- until you've had it once and tried to live without it) I managed to tape her scissors into the lining of the case. They popped out attached to the end of a pair of tights or similar when I unpacked in Kraków.

** Geeky vocab corner!! I'm slightly afraid of the Polish word for 'fringe' - grzywka - because to my phonemically-British mind it's all too close to 'dziwka' (tart - in the non-dessert sense). Incidentally, the Polish for 'a joker' or 'a nut' seems to be 'dziwak'. The plurals appear to be the same.

It was some time before I worked out that Eska Rock (radio station in Kraków) was actually advertising 'jokers on the phone' at breakfast time on a Monday morning.