Easy like a sunday morning.

The journey to the hairdressers is quite short, a brisk walk is all that's really needed to traverse the mile or so trip in its entirety. I went to the hairdressers today, I'll make a note to mention that part first next time, so as not to appear so vague and out of the blue.

On the way, I stopped mid-park amidst the screaming din of tightly funneled exhaust, to watch a tree surgeon scalp branches the width of bread sticks with a device designed for that purpose. He'd noticed I'd stopped to ponder analogies, and slowly let his saw hang loosely from a rope. My eyes had drifted out of focus, but I probably looked like I was staring. The surgeon had made this assumption too, and with the burly chuff of a fat-mouthed workman he bellowed "something wrong, mate?"

"No i was just wondering"

"You what sorry?"

"Is the chainsaw really necessary?" I hoped my slight gesture was clear enough to indicate the growing pile of twigs at the base of what could probably be called his office.

"For cutting trees down, yeah, you could say that, mate. Why? you know a better way to chop branches down?"

"You could bludgeon them to splinters with the fat end of a pot-glazed toddler."

"what?"

"nothing, sorry, carry on." I carried on in the cusp of hindsight, wishing I'd used one of my flawless analogies to further express the wryness of my initial question. 'surely it's like using the spinning engine of a 747 to grate a carrot?' I liked that one, but he wouldn't have understood what I meant.

His friend in the Van had lowered his copy of Zoo by this point, and was probably tutting the word 'ponce' as i walked away.

The hairdressers itself is nice, it smells like hair product. The tone is set by an i-pod playing Lionel Richie songs through a pair of speakers.

The highlight of the event is the hair washing, an attractive woman in a slightly see-through gray top gives what could be construed as a sensual head massage as she asks me questions about my life, and I do my best to avoid a tumescence by keeping my thoughts focused heavily on making my answers as verbose as possible.

Women like intelligence, especially if the women in question don't fully understand what you're saying. Chances are they'll swoon regardless, especially since to them, anything you say that they don't fully comprehend could be a brilliantly worded compliment...technical jargon of the well-versed that merely implies 'you've got a cracking pair of tits, love'.

She thanked my potential niceties with a mint.

The deed of the hair cutting itself comes second place to the inevitable banter that generally takes priority in the proceedings. Talk is usually kept to current affairs, with me usually having to fabricate events in the hope that I'm seen as up to date and down with it. Sadly my tale of Jade Goody having to be rescued after getting her finger stuck under the page of a book was seen as "out of order" and "well harsh" as I learned that she'd recently died of cervical cancer.

The conversation turned to my thoughts and opinions, with my statement that 'people with double-barreled last names are generally the people that annoy me for other reasons' being challenged. I put it down to the pretentiousness of the hyphen, and asked "what kind of monster allows their offspring to live with punctuated surnames?"

"What about Kanye West, you hate him and he doesn't have a punctuated surname"

"no, you're right. But he is a bit of a colon."