My Primary 7 schoolteacher, Miss Macduff, had a smile that could make a drowning man decide to wave. She often told her pupils that almost anything could be solved by a smile, although that didn't seem to apply to me and mathematics.
Nevertheless, there was a grin on my face yesterday, because yesterday was a day like no other. Or like no other recent day. Or like no day for some considerable time. The birds were singing their dawn chorus as I made my way towards a long-overdue haircut, does that provide you with a clue? Their chirpy trilling was music to my soon-to-be-visible ears.
Yes, I had a rendezvous with a tonsorial artist. A shear manipulator. I tried to forget that the traditional red and white barber's pole I could see at the end of the street represented the bloodstained bandages hung on the pole to dry and wrapped around it by the wind. A little learning is a dangerous thing - I mean in barbers, who long ago used to fancy themselves as dentists and surgeons. Many surgeons still fancy themselves, of course.
Glancing to my right, I saw a group of people who didn't resemble one another entering an eatery for an early breakfast, which might include a glass of something effervescent served on the premises by a bubbly waitress with no mask to smother her sparkle.
The owner of the establishment stood admiring her hairdo in her own shop window, having clearly beaten a path (and me) to a hairdresser's door some time before. Were they accepting pre-dawn 
walk-ins now? What next, a barbershop quartet singing the title song from the musical 'Hair'? --- ♫ Give me a head with hair, bangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghettied!♫
To be brutally blunt, which I hoped the scissors weren't going to be, lists of things to do during pandemic lockdowns hadn't cut it, even for a hack like me. Be honest, did you learn a new language? Play Pictionary with a robot? (Imagine the humiliation if you lost.) Take an Instagram baking class? Or - more bizarrely - "relax on a beach without leaving your house"? (Were drugs involved?)
Among the more mundane suggestions for our indoor amusement were origami - paper folding, taking a bath (!) and watching old films. The Home Alone franchise springs to mind.
I suppose we should applaud the idea of "going to the zoo at home" as that way you will almost never be mauled by a tiger, and cowering behind the sofa is surely more exciting than paper folding or learning Korean.
The barbershop quartet, when I reached my destination, was deficient to the tune of three, although the remaining soloist was whistling while he worked, or perhaps he was breathing stertorously, it was hard to tell above the noise of the electric clippers, these days apparently known as 'manscaping tools'. Now that would have brought a smile to Miss Macduff's face. It might even make a drowning man decide that life was worth living again. Which was more or less how I felt after my haircut. And my bath.
