That was rather unsettling. Went for a haircut to the cheap place down the road. The only barber was a woman – an extraordinarily pretty Moroccan (as it turned out).
I’ve not had my hair cut by a woman in at least a decade. The last time it was a careworn Albanian, down in West Hampstead’s Little Illyria (there really is such a place – our local Albania Town).
“All Albanian men is shits,” she hissed in my ear, at one point.
Anyway, I was a little thrown by the beauty of my barber (a Berber barber? Possibly…). I’d forgotten what an intimate act it all is, the caressing and stroking of the head…
And then I remembered that just the other day a Facebook friend (which one …?) had told me that her hairdressing husband had to put up with people who would ‘fiddle under the smock’, and so I became worried that she might suspect me of something similar, as I supposed that her beauty might well attract the wrong sort of customer. So I kept my hands rigidly on the chair arms (though still beneath the smock).
And then I felt a twitch of hey-fever. I feared a messy sneeze. I had no hanky. Could I ask her for a tissue? It would be fine if I actually sneezed. But what if the urge passed? And I drew the tissue beneath the smock, to put it in my pocket …
Anyway, it made for a very stressful twenty minutes. Half way through a silver fox character came in, bearing a bunch of flowers. Another barber had appeared, ready to work, but the silver fox waved him away, and asked my Berber barber how long she’d be. I think the flowers were for her. ‘Soon,’ she said, and I felt her hurry, rather, over my sideburns.
When I stood up after the haircut, the smock having been whipped away, I saw that the heat and the stress had resulted in the front of my shirt being sodden.
‘It’s, er, sweat,’ I said, though it would have been better to remain silent. I gave her a very generous tip.
Which again now seems like a mistake.

I had a bright idea this morning. Rather than add another (albeit biodegradable) plastic bag to the ecosphere, I thought I’d deal with Monty’s morning deposit by scooping it up in a discarded (non-recyclable) coffee cup. I hadn’t formally worked out what my next step would be – I was torn between emptying it in the drain, or just putting the whole lot in the bin. While I was mulling my next step, my eye was caught by a book in the charity shop window – ‘Rosemary Shrager’s Yorkshire Breakfasts’. The author, a middle-aged woman, loomed hugely over a dry-stone wall, before which were arrayed various food items – none of which seemed particularly Yorkshirish. A loaf of white bread. Some eggs. A tomato. Of course the true Yorkshire breakfast would be rice crispies. Or Diamond White. Anyway, the hideous cover caught me for a few moments. Long enough, in fact, for an acquaintance I’d not seen for several years to come bustling along the street. She was a school gate mother, whose name I’ve never known, as I only ever learn names on a need to know basis, and we didn’t have kids in the same class, so our interactions were always brief and perfunctory, even though she was (and still is, sort of, it turned out) quite attractive. The trouble was that she’d come along as I was gazing in at the charity shop window (never a good look), while holding a coffee cup containing some dogshit. What to do? The key, I thought, was to keep the cup above her eyeline. So, as she approached, I raised it. I think it was this – it must have looked like a toast or salute – that alerted her to my presence – I don’t think she’d clocked me before. Now she gazed at me – the unshaven man in front of the charity shop, holding up a cup of … something. She stared into my face, trying, obviously, to place me. But nothing came up. Her focus shifted into the distance, and she continued briskly on her way. I looked back at Rosemary Shrager’s doughy face, expecting to see mockery or condescension there, but she appeared quite sympathetic. I dumped the cup of shame in the bin, taking solace from the fact I’d saved an albatross or octopus from some plasticky entrapment in the wild Sargasso sea, or the reefs of Bora Bora, or wherever these things end up.

I was in the queue at Pret the other day, when I managed, for once to perform with grace one of those little pieces of life choreography. It was just a matter of neatly and deftly letting a woman into the queue. It created one of those moments of pleasant near intimacy, accompanied by that Malinowskian phatic communion – inchoate subvocalizations, intended to convey nothing but a desire to communicate. Anyway, we shuffled along after that, not speaking, but bathing in that sense of a life-task well performed. And these little things should not be underestimated, as the obverse – moments of the ballet when you fall on your arse, your tutu askew, your tights ripped, can cast a pall that lasts weeks.
So we reached the head of the queue, and then the woman – neither young nor old, but with rather a lovely face, like an attractive nun in a Hollywood blockbuster of the 1950s – half turned and said, ‘Do you mind if I …?” and then reached over and pulled at something that was stuck to my jumper, roughly in the collarbone region. Whatever it was resisted for a moment, and then came away, with a satisfying ‘tock’.
I was rather taken aback by this, and I have to confess that my first assumption was that it was a pass of some kind. I waited for the second move, constructing various excuses in my head. She was so nice that I wanted to rebuff her in as kind a way as possible. Even the truth – ‘I’m sorry, but I’m very happily married …’ might have seemed too brusque. ‘What, so I’m so awful you wouldn’t even consider me for a bit of on the side, risk-free hanky-panky…?’ So then I thought I could say that I was gay, otherwise of course I’d love to… Or perhaps that I was mid-transition, and didn’t currently have any adequately performing genitalia of any sort. Or that I was recently widowed, and it was still far too early for me to …
But phase 2 never came. The woman bought a banana and a wrap and walked away without another word.
Afterwards, what has remained with me is not the misunderstood nature of our intercourse – my assumption that it was a prelude to something more intimate – but the nature of whatever it was she pulled from my jumper. Nothing too gross, I hope, or she would surely not have touched it. A food particle, then. Something that had been moist and then dried, causing the moment of resistance before she pried it loose.
And the odd thing is that she didn’t flick it away, at least not in my sight. She still seemed to have it, when she left. Could she be some kind of fetishist? Or was she stalking me, gradually removing small particles of my being until she could reconstruct a full-sized simulacrum? And what would she do then with this inert version of me, made from fluff and food crumbs? One day will she replace the real me with the counterfeit? Would my family notice? Has it happened already?

On my late walk with Monty last night I came across this bunch of blackened bananas placed deliberately, it seemed, on a bench, not far from our apartment. I was weirdly transfixed by the bananas, and found myself speculating on their presence. I imagined a bitter marital argument, about money, I expect, rather than, you know, the other. The children listening, frightened in their rooms, clutching one, her ragdoll, the other, his teddy. Finally, the man, spluttering with inarticulate rage stands, resolving to leave, and never return. Some part of him knows that he must take something for sustenance, and he grabs the bananas – already well past their best (in that, they are like him, and perhaps it is this affinity that makes him reach for them) and leaves, slamming the door behind him. Out in the street, the cold hits him, and with it the sense that he has been ridiculous. He finds the bench and sits there for a while – ten minutes, perhaps, hoping that his wife will begin to feel some pity for him, and regret her stern line on the finances. He decides that he can go back now, thinking to pass the whole thing off as a joke. But he knows to return with the bananas will make him … absurd. So he leaves them there, on the bench. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. I don’t know what happened when he went back in. Other lives are always a mystery. But I think they’ll be OK.
Which all left me with the dilemma of what to do with the bananas. They were too far gone to eat, as you can see, even leaving aside the possibility of them having been injected with Anthrax as part of some bizarre and inept terrorist plot (the other possibility I considered). But it seemed untidy and aesthetically unsatisfying to just leave them. Had there been a bin close by I’d have disposed of them there, but there wasn’t, and the likelihood that I would have to wander the streets for hours, with poisonous (or even radioactive) bananas in my hands put me off. So I left them on the bench. I’ll pop out later and see if they’re still there. I suppose if they had been a dirty bomb, I’d have heard about it on the news.

I took Monty out for his walk this morning, in one of my rare good moods. So skipping down the stairs I began to sing ‘Monty dog, where are you going? Monty dog, Monty dog’ to the tune of Bali Ha’i from South Pacific. I strained a little to reach the high notes, but it was OK. Then I heard voices coming towards me from the lobby. Happy children’s voices, and a gently chiding mother. As I could hear them, so they must have been able to hear me. My immediate fear was that it was our next-door neighbours. It’s never good to be caught singing show tunes with made up words about your dog in falsetto in the stairs, or anywhere, really. Then another fear kicked in. Had I been singing in a faintly oriental accent, like Bloody Mary, from the musical? Had I given it a touch of the old Fu Manchus? This was particularly awkward, as our (incredibly nice) neighbour is Chinese. This had the potential to sour the relationship, doubly upsetting, as her little boy (half Italian, in the way of London), is my last surviving superfan. So I crouched in the stairway, praying that they might take the lift, and attribute the racist singing to someone else. But then a door opened further up behind me. Someone else was going to come down, and catch me there, skulking. I was trapped between the two, in a classic thriller scenario, with no hope of escape. I looked down and saw that my grey Swedish army surplus coat was tonally in tune with the carpet. I gathered a baffled Monty into the coat and tried to flatten myself face-down against the floor, hoping they’d go past, thinking I was some sort of bulbous stain, or an unknown sleeping vagrant.
But, you know what? It was all OK. The neighbours took the lift up, and the people behind me waited to take the lift down. So, you see, not all McGowan stories end in failure and humiliation.

The auguries weren’t great. Two hours sleep last night (my own fault for watching the Ashes funeral rites); then woke up with a murderous cold, each sneeze coating my hanky with what looked like Mr Kipling apple pie filling. Then, a little late, I cycled down to the tube, only to find I’d forgotten to bring my bike lock. A frantic dash home and back again left me cutting things very fine. Then I got lost wandering around London Bridge. Finally asked someone for directions to Stand street, only to have her smirk and point to the street sign directly over my head. In the test centre the staff were old-school civil servants, whose job was to exude contempt for anyone on the wrong side of the desk. Asked if there was anything in my pockets (they do everything but strip search you), I said no. The lady asked me to turn our my pockets. They contained some tissues and a five pound note. This was considered a major security breach, and I was escorted to my locker to deposit them. Then it turned out that I had two pairs of glasses, which is one over the permitted number. Back to the locker. All eyes on the cheating bozo holding everyone up. When the test began, I didn’t know the answers to the first three questions, and guessed. One was about some sort of special mirror you need when towing a caravan. Futile to rail, as I did, silently, that I had absolutely no plans of ever towing a fucking caravan anywhere ever in what’s left of my life. You have to score 43 out of 50, so this was a sad start. Then, in the hazard perception part (videos of vaguely dangerous driving situations – you have to click when you see a developing hazard), I was deemed to have over-clicked in a dishonest way, and was given 0-5. That zero points fiasco meant I had to get near full marks for every other section.
I left the room and went to the desk to get my results, convincing myself that this was a useful practice session.
‘Here is your results, Mister Doctor’, said the only friendly person there, handing me a printout. ‘Fuck you, loser’ the letter said.
Except, no. Miraculously, I’d passed.
This leads me to conclude that the theory test really isn’t that hard. Or, rather, it’s both relatively uncomplicated, and yet so filled with tension that it becomes an ordeal. Much like losing your virginity, should one ever get round to it.

Too much coffee combined with an evening spent doing my accounts meant that I spent the entire night wide awake – literally not a wink of sleep. And so of course, by about 3 am, I was replaying every awkward, embarrassing, humiliating and dishonourable episode in a life rich with such occurrences. Finally my mind came to focus on what I’d always thought of as one of the less shameful memories. Back in 1990 I was living opposite the Royal Free in Hampstead. Things had been going rather badly for me – a series of romantic misadventures and thoughtless acts had left me almost friendless – my reserves of charm, which I’d thought able to get me out of scrapes, having proved to be illusory. I was living with someone who was close to the point of loathing me – again, my fault rather than any failure of human sympathy on her part.
Anyway, it was late at night and I’d been for a walk, escaping the tension in the flat, trying to find a way forward in my life. Then I saw a legless man in a wheelchair outside the off-licence which used to be there on the corner. Wearing pyjamas and a thin dressing gown on this cold night, he was wheeling his chair back and forwards, ramming his head against the window.
I asked if he was OK, and he said he was just desperate for a drink. We were still just in time to get last orders at The Roebuck, so I wheeled him there and bought him a pint. It was impossible to guess his age – his hair was jet black, but his face was a skull. He told me his story. He’d fought in the Falklands, then worked on the railways. He’d got drunk at work one day, and been hit by a train, which is how he’d lost his legs. He’d lost everything else as well – his wife and home. He’d lived on the street for a while, and then got cancer of the everything. He was at the Royal Free waiting for an operation in two days’ time – an operation he was unlikely to survive, he said. This was his last chance to get drunk – he’d be nil by mouth the next day.
It was closing time, and he asked if I’d buy him a carry out, and wheel him back to the ward. We decided that I could be his brother, over from Australia, which he was convinced would get around the visiting hours restriction. So, his wheelchair clinking with the concealed booze, I wheeled him into the hospital and up to his ward. The male nurse on duty saw through, I guess, the act, but let me though, We stayed up for a couple of hours, drinking furtively in the sitting room at the end of the ward. He was an extraordinary character, full of humour, and utterly lacking in self-pity, despite his woes. I suppose it’s possible that much of what he said was bullshit, but I’m a natural sceptic, and I believed it all. If he’d been bullshitting, he’d have claimed he lost his legs in the war. Or that’s what I’d have done.
Finally the booze was out, and I had to go. I wished him luck for the operation, and remember stooping awkwardly to embrace him in his chair.
I’ve told this story many times, always in a vaguely self-congratulatory way, proving how decent I am, and how open to experience. Also, because I though the man deserved to be remembered.
But this morning, racked by insomnia and anxiety I suddenly saw the obvious, terrible truth in the story. I lived opposite the hospital – literally a stone’s throw away. I was possibly his only friend. Yet I didn’t go and visit the ward later in the week to find out what had become of him. Once I’d walked out of the Royal Free, he stopped existing as a real person, and became only a character in a story I’d tell. I’d completely failed in my duty as a human being. Twenty-six years it’s taken me to see this.

That was a really unsatisfactory visit to the dentist. I knew that things weren’t as they should be, back in the grinding department. All of my back teeth hurt or, rather, don’t feel right. Some feel very wrong for brief periods, others sort of mooch about, in a ne’er do well sort of way, grumbling and moaning.
The dentist agreed that there were problems. She shook her head at the x-rays, pointing out areas of sub-optimality. But nothing was quite wrong enough to merit an intervention.
So home I came, with teeth neither right nor wrong, and nothing to be done about it. Except for the prohibitively expensive implant option to replace my favourite tooth, the one that, after a lifetime of magnificent service went and got an abscess and had to be euthanised. I shed actual tears over that tooth, and for a time I would contemplate it, Hamlet like, with the skull of Yorick. Then it fell on the floor and got hoovered up.
The trouble with all this is that it means that I live in my mouth at the moment. It’s more or less all I think about, except for the occasional diversion into cricket, or, even less frequently, hanky-panky. Sometimes the three get mixed up together, in a way satisfactory to none of the parties involved.
Maybe if my petty cash situation improves I might go and get one of those dodgy Hungarian implants they advertise at the back of the Telegraph. I’ll probably end up with some kind of tusk, like a boar or a narwhal.
On the plus side, my dentist said I have the gums of a much younger man, and she praised my flossing in a way that, clutching at straws, I’m going to take as mildly flirtatious.