The boy in the barber’s chair was in an extreme of misery, swathed in a sheet and gripping the ends of the arms, while a horrible old man, dressed in a creased cotton jacket, one pocket stuffed with bits of towel, and wearing spectacles tied on with a string behind his head, made for his thick locks with snip-snap scissors. One of those old shaving dishes, with a half-moon cut out for the chin, lay on a chest of drawers, and a fat brush plucked from a dead mammal hung on a nail. The place didn’t seem very clean.

This was at my barber's but it wasn't my barber’s. It was a picture hanging between the mirror and the transistor playing Graham Norton on Radio 2. The nineteenth-century picture was meant to be humorous, just as in those days they depicted toothache as though it were humorous.

I used to be a boy myself, and I disliked visiting the barber’s. There were physical dangers such as getting soapy water in one’s eye. The bigger obstacle was social. The barber regarded boys as a kind of domestic animal that could only be talked at with joshing mockery.

Today I am very glad that the barber’s exists. Mine is where Cardinal Hume used to have his hair cut. He had better hair than I, and more of it, and must have been exercising Benedictine poverty by not going somewhere posher.