A TONSORIAL HUBBUB

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 88, 8 January 1935, Page 8

A TONSORIAL HUBBUB

Criticism of the barber is usually confined to the comic papers, where his loquacity and his occasional slips of the razor, or the scissors are made sport of by joke writers and humorous artists. He never resents it. Serious criticism is another matter, as a correspondent in The Dominion discovered when he complained that he-could not get a satisfactory haircut in Wellington. There are not many people who really enjov having a haircut. It is an operation which as a rule is postponed, like the visit to the dentist, till the last possible minute, and then has to be done in a hurry, at a time when necessity overrides convenience, and the barber has a long waiting list. In these circumstances most of us are glad to get the business over without worrying very much about the sesthetic points of the barber’s saloon or the literature he stocks for his waiting clients. We brace ourselves for the usual comments on the weather and the races and register a silent hope that the operator will get on with it and' allow us to escape at the earliest possible moment. The latter-day barber’s shop has developed into the equivalent of the old-time English coffee house, where people met to exchange the gossip of the day, and ’it not infrequently happens that the barber switches his conversation from his seething victim to other chairs or to waiting patrons, a digression usually indulged in with the scissors poised in mid-air, or waved about in emphasis. It might not be in the interest of good haircutting that the barber’s saloon should become a salon, but it is only once in a while that a “Strewelpeter” arises to remind us that there is a distinction