On cue, an enormously fat woman with an ill-fitting halter neck top walked up the stairs. Seconds later, a woman so small her clothes would have been ex-VAT appeared. ("Fuck me, it's a dwarf!", said Mel.) More and more people came; there was a lot of hair gel, spades full of foundation and some concentration on 'trends' as outlined in Closer magazine every week. And suddenly, everything made sense.
I have long wondered what it is that makes provincial towns different to London. I'm not talking about the Proper Cities like Manchester or Newcastle (and Glasgow's much better than London), but that particularly English type of market town. There's something different about the people there. Richard Skinner usually works at the local radio station and plays hits from the 80s; there are 'boutiques' that sell clothes your mother wouldn't wear and a High Street like every other High Street in Britain. There's usually a 'posh bit' that has lovely shops (including an organic butcher), and very pretty houses that you could buy if you decided not to live in London.
.
But what is it about the people I see in the streets? I've been looking at them for years. I see them on the television and read about them in the magazines. They do phone-ins on local radio, Sky Plus the X-Factor and live a mile away from their mothers. But these facts aside, they are Different to me and I have never been sure why. But one evening at Blush (Cheltenham's Premier Nightclub) and All Is Clear: people in provincial market towns have the kind of hairstyles you only ever see in the window of hairdressers. Improbably layered things with complicated fringes and boys looking like boys do in Coronation Street: hair so sticky that if you threw something at it, it would stick, sculpted into improbable crusting shapes.
I think I've found the secret. There's fuck-all else to do in an English provincial town of an evening except drink pints, get in fights and eat chips in the street, so complicated hairdos are just another way of passing the time.
As for me, I've got very simple, short hair. I think it makes me look elegant and tidy, but I probably look like a fat ladyboy. I'm not sure what's worse, frankly.
8 comments:
YES!
That's it. This bugged me whilst we lived in Aylesbury, that's exactly it... the bloody hairdos (or rather, hair-don'ts).
And YES! Glasgow IS, isn't it...
I must inspect my fellow inhabitants of the provincial market town in which I live for this hairstyle phenomenon. I can't say it's something I've noticed. And you've seen my hair - it's just kinda hairy really. All one length. No deliberate sticky-uppy bits.
The thing I do notice is that it is a very rare thing indeed for me to walk into town and *not* see someone I know.
"There's fuck-all else to do in an English provincial town of an evening except drink pints, get in fights and eat chips in the street." Welcome to my adolescence.
'Blush', Jesus, sounds like a paint chart.
What do they say to each other, here it would be 'Stitch that', maybe it's "Swatch that!"
I would take issue with your implication that London is not the all-time bestest. I believe Dr. Johnson put it best when he averred that a Gentleman who was tired of London was a Gentleman who was almost certainly in need of some sort of slap. I don't doubt that some testy rustic will pop along in a minute and suggest that London is Rubbish and that some unconscionable backwater like Whitby or Swindon was the centre of all World Culture and for them I have but three words: No it isn't. Oh! and three more! Don't be silly.
I would lay all blame for the provincial hair problem at the doors of Coronation Street, which serves as a sort of template for non-London behaviour and which all young men inexplicably favour hair a bit like Lou Ferrigno out of The Hulk.
I blame Charles Worthington. For a man to have hair at all is a privilege, not a right, and every man so gifted should by law be obliged to have a sensible haircut.
So, I think you will agree, there.
I think the fake pearl animals should have tipped you off what you were up against.
oh dear. you've just explained why I got through quite a lot of hair gel in the eighties.
Mostly what mikey said.
I also think that its part of our basic drive to be seen as different and special. In such little places where there is very little to differentiate (bearing in mind that the ramifications of letting the people you saw alldayeveryday know what you are REALLY like are beyond most people) perhaps hairstyle is a simple way to feel like you are expressing your individuality. Because your hair pokes up in 3 different places and daves pokes up in 4. Its not so different to school really.
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