A short back and sides tale from an above-board Chinese barber

Beijing Letter: The time came, as it must to all of us, when the hair had to be cut. Ever since I was four and had the back of my neck shaved with a cut-throat razor, visits to barbers and hairdressers have been anticipated with less longing than visits to the dentist.

To this natural aversion was added, in China, another, slightly more rational, reason to let the grey-brown tresses proliferate around my bald patch like brambles trailing over a concrete path.

In my first few days in Beijing, I noticed that the side of the street opposite my apartment had an extraordinary number of small shops with barber's poles twirling luridly outside and bored-looking young women waiting for customers amid the sinks and mirrors.

I became vaguely aware that they seemed to stay open late into the night, but put that down to the legendary Chinese work ethic. It was quite a while before I heard the phrase "whore-dressers" and discovered that most Beijing brothels use barber shops as fronts.

This added a new dimension of anxiety to the haircut problem. Not speaking Chinese, I tend to get by with a lot of smiling, waving, eye-widening and pointing.

I could wander into a brothel that looked like a barber shop, start smirking and waving my hands about in exaggerated gestures of friendly intent and end up on the front pages of both the Workers' Daily and the Star.

The heat, on the other hand, was making it impossible to persist with the unruly mane. I had just about resolved to go to one of the big American hotels and pay Cherie Blair-type prices for a cut when a Chinese friend offered to direct me to his barber and assured me that it was entirely above-board.

When I got to the place, I had my doubts. It was exactly the kind of dive I would have avoided: a tiny one-room shop down a side alley, with a plastic string curtain hanging in red, green and yellow strips where a door should be. Inside, it made the dingy barbers I remember from my childhood look glamorous: a poster of Britney Spears on the wall, four ill-matched chairs for waiting patrons, two barber's chairs in front of the mirrors, a china dog on a television set and work surfaces of off-white formica, stained and chipped.

But the place was so small and the middle-aged ladies who were my fellow customers so pleasantly amused at the sight of me that I couldn't slink away.

The burly man who was having his hair cut by one of the two busy young women who ran the place had his head rinsed a final time and left. I sat in the chair and the young woman put some amber-coloured towels around my neck.

If she had then taken out a bowl to put around my head and a garden shears to chop off the straggly bits, I'd have been happy enough just to get it over with. Instead, she poured a little shampoo into a bottle and added a small amount of warm water. She smoothed the concoction onto my head and proceeded to build up a thick, creamy lather.

The lathering went on for 10 minutes of slow, methodical kneading, whipping up not just soap but the primeval pleasure that lurks inside all of us from the days when we were apes and our mothers were combing our fur for fleas.

I probably looked ridiculous, sitting back with crazy tufts of white soapy hair sticking out in all directions, like Medusa in a snowstorm. But I was drifting too far into a shut-eyed reverie to bother looking in the mirror.

I opened my eyes when she stopped and pointed for me to get up and go to the sink to have what now looked liked an especially fluffy meringue rinsed off my head.

Back in the chair, I waited for the scissors to come out. Instead, she pressed a thick pad against her own stomach and yanked my head back against it. She battered my skull, using her fingers like flails. She started to massage my forehead, temples and sinuses. She pulled my eyelids down as if she was closing a blind against a horrid face at the window.

She pushed her knuckles sharply into my jawbone like she was trying to dislodge some evil spirit that was lurking there.

When she pushed her fingers into my ears and jiggled them about, it struck me that this was probably the most intimate thing you could do without actually committing adultery and I woke up from my blissed-out trance long enough to wonder if I had, after all, come to the wrong kind of hairdresser.

But through half-open eyes, I could see in the mirror that the middle-aged woman in the other chair was having exactly the same operation performed on her.

It was all part of having your hair cut.

The pummelling went on for half an hour. My shoulders were jabbed more times than a clapped-out prize-fighter. She stretched and twisted my arms and pulled on my fingers as if trying to jerk them out of their sockets.

By the time she had finished, I had the image in my head of the way bits of your hair are strewn about you on the floor as you're having a hair-cut except that, this time, the floor was covered with clumps of stress and tufts of anxiety. You have your brain cut, I realised, before your hair cut.

By the time the scissors actually came out, I was so laid back I wouldn't have cared much if she'd used them to cut my throat.

It struck me afterwards that this is what people do when they have very few luxuries: make big, pleasurable, ceremonious occasions from the little diversions of life. My hair-and-brain cut cost 15 yuan (€1.5), making it an affordable treat for ordinary Chinese workers.

The sad thing is that my hair is now too short to justify another haircut next week, but for the first time in my life I am willing it to grow fast.