Rory Van Millingen The writer John Freeman at Pall Mall Barbers in the Fitzrovia neighborhood in London.A trip to the local barbershop, from Beijing to Beirut, gives one man an entree into the customs and people of each country he visits — as well as a smooth shave.
Ten years ago, I began dating a woman from Lebanon. The first thing she did when I moved in was to throw out my seersucker. The second thing was to ask me to grow a beard.
In the Middle East, a man without hair on his face is a boy, and given that I was also 13 years younger than her, the need for some growth was doubly pressing. I did my best and grew out a bit of stubble. But now what? There’s a fine line between intentional growth and looking unkempt or hung over. I bought clippers. All of them broke, or turned on during cross-country flights, sounding suspiciously like another electronic item.
On a trip to Barcelona, I passed by a barbershop and, on an impulse, ducked in. Spaniards know a thing or two about how to keep a permanent 5 o’clock shadow. Within minutes, they’d sorted me out. I discovered that it was easy enough to learn the verb “to shave” in many more languages, and there’s nothing quite like exposing one’s neck to the knives of the world to experience the thin blade of civility that unites us.
I’ve been tipped back on rubber chairs in London. I’ve been plunged into the sort of debate that rages in salons de coiffure in Beirut, when my barber seemed to be taking a poll of his other customers about where my neckline should stop. During the shave, which took an hour, he drank four espressos. A gentleman of 60 sitting by the door caught sight of a remaining ear hair and pointed it out triumphantly. In Turkey, barbers take their time. Within a stone’s throw of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, my girlfriend and I nestled into a tiny shop perfumed with talc and tonic. One man was relaxing into the ear depilation that in that part of the world begins not long after puberty. The barbers politely rippled at the presence of a woman.
The swarthier a place, the better its barbers will be, and vice versa. In Beijing, my barber mowed my face like a lawn. In Norway, the cleanshaven guy discussed waxing. You never know what the perks will be: My Uzbek barber in Manhattan serves me vodka with my shave. My Bulgarian barber advised me where to get a sandwich, and in São Paulo, I was told where to go dancing.
Clockwise from top left: Nicole Aragi; Christian Kober/John Warburton-Lee Photography/ALAMY; Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos; Emily Webber. Clockwise from top left: the author gets lathered up by a Moroccan barber at a market in the Atlas Mountains; a barber with a customer on the streets of Beijing; a neighborhood shop in Istanbul; Jazz’s Barbers in West London, where Freeman was a regular when he lived in the city.Way up in the Atlas Mountains, two hours from Marrakesh, in a food market taking place on a carpet of severed lambs’ heads, I once found a tent and several gentlemen plying their knives at beards much more impressive than mine. I drew a small crowd of onlookers when I took my seat. A long discussion in Arabic revolved around how the blade had been sanitized — with alcohol, my Moroccan friend assured me in English, but his eyes were worried. I closed mine and soon felt the barber’s breath on my temples. I emerged unscathed, but for two palmprints of sweat I’d nervously left on my thighs.
There’s an intimacy to being barbered that I find oddly reassuring when far from home. A good barber will push and knead at your face before beginning, as if it is dough. He will lean in close and occasionally stroke the area he has just shaved, in a sort of appreciation. Most of us have not been touched this way since we were babies.
But taking a private ritual and making it public isn’t supposed to make the world your living room or kitchen or toilet for that matter. It’s meant to make the world seem more familiar and to give us a foothold when traveling. This is why we go out for coffee or get a drink at a bar. Knowing that so many others have these needs, and that they can be satisfied, even with a bit of style, is reassuring.
When I moved to London five years ago to start a job, my first order of business was to find a new barber. I lived in Notting Hill, on a blocklong row of limestone townhouses so tidy it made one think no one in history had ever had to shave. To get to a barber, I’d go to Shepherd’s Bush, where evidence of London’s teeming multiplicity was everywhere: Moroccan tagine joints, Iranian beauty parlors, a century-old market where you could buy anything from a freshly slaughtered pig to saris to one of the best falafels in the city.
After a few failures, I found my place. It was a small shop with three Kurdish guys working under the name Jazz’s Barbers. The walls were made of a fake varnished wood and the barber sheet they tossed over me was bright orange. No matter. For a fiver, I could get an excellent whisker trim while a 1950s radio played 1980s hits. I visited London recently and, out of nostalgia, went back to Jazz’s. As always, the main barber nodded toward the bench, where I could wait. Another smiled. Now there was a woman barber too! But otherwise it was as if I had never left. Life at Jazz’s was going on much as before.
This lack of sentimentality, and the getting on with it, has always seemed to me the epitome of manliness. There’s comfort in the silence that surrounds necessaries. For these reasons, I would take 45 minutes in a barber’s chair over an hour on any therapist’s couch. There’s so little we can actually control in this world, but even the unruliest beard can be managed. When I want to feel fresh and ready to tackle something new, I go in for what’s known in the trade as a wet shave, which includes the works: hot towels, foam, straight razor. At the end of my last London trip I went to Pall Mall Barbers’ swank Fitzrovia shop. Tucked just off the square where Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw once lived, it was everything you’d expect a luxury London barber to be.
The tiles were gleaming white, the countertops granite and the barber’s brush was made of badger, not horsehair. My barber looked a lot like Stanley Tucci, but spoke with a South London accent. Happily, he stopped talking once he began shaving. All I could feel was the gentle sweep of his blade, his occasional request for more hot towels. Time slowed down. I no longer had my long-lost seersucker, but all else was right with the world.
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