For someone habitually adverse to change, a visit to the barber’s has always been something of a fraught experience.  But now an additional peril has been added to the mix.  It is with a sensation of dread that I sit in the hydraulic chair, protective gown pulled up tight to my neck, waiting for the barber to utter that fateful word: “Eyebrows?”

At least the word is offered as a question.  I have my chance to utter a definitive: “No.”  But what if my answer is wrongly interpreted?  Where I have said “No” meaning “No, leave my eyebrows alone” perhaps the barber is understanding my monosyllable as “No eyebrows, please”?

I attempt to explain further: “You can leave my eyebrows to me.  I’ll sort them out when I get back home.  No need for you to touch them.  KEEP OFF MY EYEBROWS!”

The barber looks at me, incomprehension writ large across his face.  He reaches for a trimmer; whirs it into action.  I am at his mercy.  The fate of my eyebrows hang by a thread.  The trimmer sings uncritically, like a chainsaw approaching virgin Amazon rainforest; the unsuspecting instrument of mass destruction.  The barber gives my chair a spin and returns to methodically neatening-up the nape of my neck.  My eyebrows are reprieved.  But for how long?

Eyebrows seem a particularly vulnerable strip of hair: so swift to remove; so easy to desecrate; so devastating the loss.  They are the Sycamore Gap of my facial landscape.  As the rest of my hair has turned increasingly grey, my eyebrows remain a hallowed enclave, which has retained its youthful brown.  As such, like a rare and endangered species, I feel that they are in need of special protection.  So, while an increasingly large shower of white hair falls about my shoulders to litter the floor at my feet, I keep a special watch for any covert incursions that my barber might be thinking of making towards my precious supercilium.

But, what is this?  The trimmer is switched off and unplugged.  The scissors are being packed away.  The brush has come out to dust away all the small, loose hairs from my neck and forehead, and the gown is being loosened at my neck.  It looks as though my latest haircut is over.  My eyebrows have survived unscathed.

But, just when I think that it is safe to breathe a sigh of relief, my barber springs one last surprise on me:

“Sideburns?”

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree suffers from tonsurephobia.