Low life | 12 July 2018

I flew from Marseille to Gatwick, rode the Gatwick Express to Victoria, and walked down the thoroughfare of Victoria Street eating a Marks & Spencer egg and tomato sandwich. In Victoria Street, I bought a shirt, pattern of flying ducks, from the House of Fraser selected menswear sale, to replace the sweat-soaked one I was wearing. Then I cut through the passage leading to Palmer Street and dropped in for an unpremeditated haircut at the Pall Mall barbershop. The chap who cut my hair was lively and talkative.

Where had I come from today? France, I said. France? He didn’t like France. He’d tried it a few times but France didn’t agree with him. He just couldn’t get on with it. And what were my plans for the rest of the day? A few drinks outside the Two Chairmen pub, I told him, then a weekly paper’s summer party. Which paper was that then? I told him. And would he be right in thinking it would be a posh party? It would. The Prime Minister of the day usually goes, I said. Well, it was a good decision to get your hair cut then, he said. You don’t want to stand in front of Theresa May looking like Ken Dodd. It would be ‘jarring’ for her.

Jarring! I rejoiced at the word by laughing, and he laughed, and all at once I was overwhelmingly glad to be back in England and among Londoners and their habit of humorously resurrecting antiquated words to flavour their speech. A simple word had reversed my expat entropy and welcomed me back to the land of the living.

When he’d finished snipping, I arose from the chair shorn and with an unwonted side parting.