The best place to shave your head?

An Italian riverside is a good a place as any

Nuts for breakfast, quick pee, and moments into the day’s journey I was hit by one of the archetypal aromas of Italy – the blue fumes from the tailpipe of an unhealthy-looking Alfa Romeo, ‘waaargh’ing past 4000rpm as its driver gave it the beans.

I’d crossed the border from Switzerland in the rain and dark the previous night and was immediately swept up in the torrent of traffic around Milan. Here the driving is con spirito, occasionally con fuoco, and the scenery is non-existent, but at least the autostrada is easy to follow. A bit too easy really; it takes you in almost a straight line for an eternity down the east side of Italy. Thankfully, not long after inhaling Alfa parp and inwardly dying as Google Maps told me to bear right in 362km, some hilly bits emerged, and I dived for the nearest exit. My eyeballs required it. These lumps were no less than the northern reaches of the Apennines, the chain of mountains running almost the length of Italy – mountains I had never seen before.

I would discover their more dramatic peaks further south, capped in dazzling snow, but these rocky wrinkles were interesting enough. This also seemed a suitable moment to look for somewhere to attack my head with clippers. Why waste a good detour?

A short cut

Until recently, I’d always had a bit of a mop. Any attempts at styling it have always felt as narcissistic as they do futile. Something about my hair just looks crap, whatever I do with it; if I preen and prune to get one angle looking okay, it looks stupid if you stand the other side of me. And as soon as the wind blows it all goes to cock anyway. When I finally bit the bullet last year and had it cut short (number three on the sides, four on top) it was a great relief, but what I really wanted to be able to do was trim it myself. It was time to bite the bullet again, but harder this time, or bite a second bullet, or whatever, and get the clippers out. A crossroads was about to be reached, a frontier crossed, a new leaf overturned, a metaphor flogged.

So – where’s best to cut your hair when you’re on the move? For some reason I felt I needed privacy, as if cutting your hair is embarrassing or naughty, but doing it in an AirBnB just seemed rude. What would I do with the trimmings? Leave them in a bin? Perhaps someone would think I was an outlaw changing his identity on the run, and call the police.

No, it had to be somewhere anonymous, and outside. I envisaged some sort of wooded layby, hidden among trees and far from houses. The problem with woods though is that people can creep up on you, and I didn’t fancy having to say ciao to anyone while looking like, well… like this.

Like a travelling frontiersman trekking across the New World, I needed to set up camp somewhere secluded where I wasn’t going to be seen, but with long enough vistas so I could spot Injuns coming before they saw me and wondered why a peculiar foreigner was trying to scalp himself without their intervention.

Soon, I found it. It was a non-descript sort of valley, sparsely populated, with a shallow river running between a wide area of muddy stones over which its floodwaters had previously gushed. Non-descript, but as valid and real as any other. Places don’t need to be exciting to be worth stopping in and admiring. If you’ve read the likes of Tom Allen or Alastair Humphreys, both excellent travel writers who cut their teeth in ‘adventuring’ by cycling around the world, learning to find wonder in all sorts of mundane places, you’ll have come across this kind of thinking before. Charles Beaudelaire, a keen traveller and a progenitor of the concept of modernism a century and a half ago, was an early lyricist about such things. (I won’t pretend to have read any Beaudelaire – this insight comes via Alain de Botton.) Much of the world is ordinary, and that’s ok. Perfection can be ordinary too. It’s a healthy kind of travel that allows us to feel at peace and curious wherever we happen to be.

"To love only perfection is just another way of hating life, for life is not perfect."
Laurens van der Post, Venture into the Interior

Here, the tarmac was rough and the traffic rare. Almost as common as the cars were the solitary cyclists out enjoying themselves, even the slippery lycra-clad ones – the kind which in most other places always look as if they’ve just realised they’ve left something in the oven.

Oak trees still held onto fragile leaves that had died months earlier, and old rose hips clung to the bushes. The hillsides were steep, some scrubby with scree, some green with fresh crops shooting away. From some angles they reminded me of the White Peak area of the Peak District, complete with its claggy soil, which turned the wide river milky as it gushed over the stones. That water, when it rises again, will now carry my trimmings out towards the Adriatic.

Obviously it took a few goes to achieve something vaguely un-embarassing. In fact, even though some days have elapsed since then, I still haven’t got around to make the final tweaks. Probably should…

I realise that having short hair isn’t rare or exotic, but I’d encourage anyone who’s never tried it to give it a go. To lose that befuddlement of teeny strings that have squatted on your ears and flustered around your forehead for so many years, and to know that you will look the same regardless of winds or pillows or hats, and that yes, you can dunk your head in the river and be dry again within seconds… all that comes as a huge relief. It’s not that I’m against hair – long or short, straight or curly (memories of an ex-girlfriend’s luxurious curls are difficult to expunge). If you can rock a certain look, rock it. But if you’re bored of the upkeep, consider shaving it back, or having someone else do it, and see how it feels.

People won’t notice, or if they do, they won’t care, and if they do, you’ll know that their opinion is one you’re better off without anyway.

Once a frustrated sea creature, now happier as a hedgehog.

Looking for a place to park up for the night, I saw what I thought was a cat in the car headlights, but instead of swiftly slinking off into the darkness, as cats do, it pivoted towards me, adopted a bullish little swagger and raised a big brush of spines. A porcupine! I stopped the car and it waddled away a little, then plucked up the courage for another faux assault as I crept past.

“Hello mister porcupine,” I thought. (Or probably said out loud.) “Don’t mind me. Just a hedgehog passing through.”