Sock in the Solar Plexus

There are some people who were probably reading magazines not meant for them when they should have been in the line where some or the other of the many angels was administering some modesty.

Got the flow? No? Okay. You were probably doing it too when quick-grasping-ability was being ladled out.

The point is that some people strut through life thinking they are the bees knees. But this post is not about that. This post is about how to make them fall down on theirs.

And after rigorous and I must say, excruciating research, I have hit upon the most effective method - A visit to the hairdresser.

Hairdresser? Isn't it O.Nash or some such bird who said that the worst thing that could befall the human race was a visit to the dentist?

..Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.

No, that is olde hat. If you want to kill a chap's self-confidence such that he is never able to rise from the depths again, send him for a haircut.

These hair-salons nowadays are peopled by folks of such fortitude that they don't hesitate to bluntly state what your mother would quake in her Bata flip-flops about. Oh, they are brave, undoubtedly in the wrong profession. They should have been operating guillotines during the French revolution.

Disdainfully, across the years, I have been painfully acquainted with the fact that my hair is too thin, is falling too much, is not the right texture, has an extraordinarily high percentage of split ends, turns North when it should face South, and is in general the follicular equivalent of a drug addict caught trying to pawn his blind mother's scrawny jewels. Furthermore, I have been chided about not using the right shampoo, conditioner, toner, light beam, laser. My scalp has not been spared either. I have, on occasion, sported an oily one, at times an extraordinarily dry one, undoubtedly, with sheets of dandruff flowing down the back, and today - horror of horrors, it was accused of having a disease, with suggestion in place that a visit to the Dermatologist was in order.

As I walked away humbled, my spirit a mere shadow of its former self, a scene floated in front of the pensive eye. Date - April the 30th, circa 1945. A little man, with a furious expression and a toothbrush mustache, sits down to get his daily trim, while a somewhat sinister looking character hovers around him with a pair of clippers. A snort, a questioning glance, eyelids heavy with disgust - "They are not what they used to be, Sie ware besser dran ohne sie".