Diary of a St Ivean

I once saw a Private Eye cartoon in which a barber's shop has on its wall a menu of subjects - politics, sex, TV, sport, philosophy - for the customer to choose what he wished to talk about while his hair was being cut.

I think I have found in Penzance a hairdresser where you can get a decent haircut without this obligation to engage in tedious conversation with the person cutting your hair.

The reason for this happy arrangement is that this 'salon' is staffed by young women who quickly work out from your age, dress, and general demeanour that you're probably uninterested in Hip-Hop, binge drinking or casual fornication. Initially, you may have to answer technical questions about what grade of cut you want, whether you want the back squared or something else, and if you usually have a clipper cut. As I don't know what any of this means I answer No and hope for the best, keeping my fingers crossed under the shroud.

After that you should be left in peace until the job is done.

I used to visit a 'gentlemen's hairdresser' ( a misnomer if judged by the row of unkempt reprobates lined up on the seat waiting their turn) in Truro. And there the barber and I always had exactly, exactly the same conversation. I almost suggested we made a recording of it so that I could sit in silence at future appointments.

Leonard would ask me if it was busy in St Ives and I would respond with a brief report of the visitor situation there; then I would remark on the busyness or otherwise of Truro. Then we would limp on to the subject of holidays.

Leonard had a partner who hailed from Birmingham. If I happened to get him cutting my hair, I would have to listen to him telling me how wonderful Cornwall was and how he would never return to the Midlands. Never.

But I arrived there one day to find a notice in the window announcing a job vacancy and offering the successful applicant "up to" £500 a week. Just before Christmas the partner had gone to a wedding in Birmingham and while there had found a job in Worcester. ''He's emigrated", was Leonard's gruff reply whenever anyone asked where the partner was. "He's emigrated - to Worcester". He was very bitter at this betrayal.

I used to have my hair cut by a man called Joe. He had a very shiny bald head and he wore a white overall like a man in the control room of a nuclear power station. He had a real peg-leg made of roughly turned wood and secured to his truncated limb with black leather straps. Joe could cut you hair while holding a conversation with a man in the next room or persons beyond the plate glass window on the pavement outside.

The last time I visited Truro and passed Leonard's the vacancy notice was still there in the window.