Getting a Haircut in Kuching

Ever since I came to live in Malaysia, my hair has started to grow faster.

I don't understand why - maybe it's the clean air, the bright sun and plenty of rain that always falls in tropical places like this. I don't know.

But I remember that when I was back in the UK, I could often go for a couple of months or more between trips to the barbers. Now, here in the tropical paradise of Borneo, I need to have my salt and pepper locks trimmed once a month.

Not that that's a problem. One thing you notice about Malaysia is that there is no shortage of places to go and have your hair cut. Hairdressers (you will rarely see this word used in Malaysia by the way) come literally in all shapes, sizes, colours and socio-economic profiles.

For instance, there are glitzy, modern mirror-palaces staffed by slim, cool youngsters with hairstyles that look like the aftermath of a car bomb. Places like this have trendy names like Fantastic Sams, Alan Ting Hair Design or Alan Salon. They are often laced with potted plastic plants or decorated in lurid plastic.

Mirrors are everywhere.

There is often lots of chrome, shiny porcelain and of course the ever-present hydraulic multi-adjustable chairs which are surrounded by a spare carpet of black or brown hair clippings.

The ambiance is rushed and youthful in salons like this, rap music booming out of a sound system that looks like the flight deck of a 747. If you are lucky, you will be treated to the local radio station, or even sweet silence. But not often.

Most of the time, I have my hair done at a place like this. It is situated in a large shopping mall in the centre of Kuching (the one with the Space Warp!), and has the added bonus of being a short walk from one of the best bookshops in town.

Some time ago, then, I noticed that my hair was starting to grow back into the 1970s, or, as an old friend once put it, was looking decidedly professorial (meaning messy). So I drove over to the Parkson Shopping centre and, after finding a lucky parking slot down in the depths of the place, I made my way to my favourite hair emporium, Fantastic Sams.

Instead of the usual booming music, fast, youthful pace and mirrored activity of the place, I was greeted with staff members dismantling the fixtures and seemingly putting everything into boxes! I was told that the place was undergoing renovations and I would have to come back in a couple of weeks.

Well, I wasn't having that, and neither was my hair. So I activated my back-up plan, which involved a visit to one of the other kind of hair-dressers that you still find in Malaysia: the old-fashioned, no-nonsense street barbershop.

Although I relish the modernity of the Fantastic Sams type of hair salon, conferring on an old man like me some measure of dying youth, I am still deeply impressed and satisfied by a rare trip to the barbers.

I remember the best haircut I ever had was in the basement of Paddington Station in London, many years ago with my mother. It was a tiny establishment run by an old Jewish gentleman who had two chairs, one long mirror and a proud array of photos of celebrities who had visited his little shop.

That man gave me, for just five pounds sterling, the best Tom Cruise short back and sides I had ever had. I felt a million dollars and looked a million dollars. I still have the picture. Yessss!

Now, as an overweight academic with overweight hair, I took myself to the nearest equivalent of that old London barber I could find in Kuching - a small Chinese barber shop situated in the middle of the Tabuan Jaya shopping area, not far from my place.

Normally, this hair emporium is extremely busy, with four or five potential customers waiting outside on little wooden chairs in the heat. But luckily, I was able to go straight into the airconditioned shop and, after a short wait reading a 1997 copy of the Malaysian Airlines in-flight magazine, I was ushered to my seat by a middle-aged Chinese man who didn't speak much English and looked like he didn't care.

"Shot?" He asked me, meaning 'short', after draping a spotless white cloth over my ample frame. I replied by giving him those international generalised hand gestures used by all barber shop customers in situations like this, to let him know how I wanted my hair to be chopped.

And, for the next 20 minutes or so, I was treated to an experience that is sadly going out of date these days. A small room, three chairs, two middle-aged hair-cutters chatting away to each other in loud, raucous Hokkien with an old man chipping in his two pennies' worth in the background, and the radio playing nice tunes, not too loud, no rap, no eminem.

My haircutter used his clippers, scissors and cut-throat razor with such calm, casual expertise to turn my bush into a neat, short-back and sides with some semblance of order on top.

After shaving my neck with slow, surgical, almost loving strokes of his cutthroat, and brushing all the bits of loose hair out using a comb laced with cotton lint, he wiped my neck and face with a hot towel, removed my cloth and was finished.

I looked neat, tidy and younger. When I asked him how much, he simply said '8 ringgit'. The old man in the background called out 'eight dollar' as if to reinforce the message, which was: you can still get good service for a cheap price.

I walked out of the barbers having spent only eight dollars, but feeling a million dollars again, just like I had all those years ago in Paddington Station. Who needs to spend 30 ringgit to have your hair pampered in the latest fashionable salon by trendy young things using space-age haircare products when you can go back in time, to when hair cutting was a simple art performed by ordinary men in white shirts with no pretensions, only skill, experience and brylcreem?

I think I'll be seeing the old Chinese man again, next month.