Articles Available Online

I I used to worry about how much more intelligent and successful I would be if I hadn’t spent so much time talking to other people, waking up in their homes, never sleeping enough, enraptured by temporary intimacies, by the women I would introduce myself to and the challenges we’d make to each other What a brighter mind I’d have if I’d stayed in, if I’d read and written much more – and I wished I had behaved differently, until I realised that this was useless, suicidal, that the man I would have become would feel no sympathy whatsoever for the man I am, and I have only narrowly avoided being murdered by him, this superior bastard, this loathsome know-it-all, who would have got away with it completely, and no one would have mourned me When I think about this I don’t feel so bad about my choices   My name is Paul I work in a bookshop and write two pages for a style magazine called Haircut The pages were both my idea I pitched them to the editor – Stev’n, ‘rhymes with seven,’ he insists – when he was going on dates with my sister and briefly listened to what I had to say In one page I write about books In the other I write about haircuts The juxtaposition of these two pages might perfectly express the contradictions of my soul I get paid twice the amount to write the haircut page as the books page, and it takes me perhaps less than a tenth of the time I go out in Hackney and Peckham, approach strangers, and ask if I can take a picture of them to feature in Paul’s Haircut Review Alongside their picture in the magazine and online I award their hairstyle between one and five pairs of scissors – a system I developed personally and which as far as I know is unique Hair criticism is not a hard science – it is more akin to the interpretation of dreams Using imaginative empathy like that of an analyst or old-fashioned literary realist, I write a