Precious time

Living in any major metropolis from Toronto to New Delhi, New York to London is a grand experience and one that I’d exhort anyone to try for a little while at least. It is exciting, frenetic and enthralling. There is more to do than you could fit into two lifetimes: so many stores to shop, places to dine; galleries to peruse and theatre to bemuse; sights to explore and people to ignore (please refer to my previous column on friendliness in the city).

But, amidst all of this feverish living of life, the one thing that you can not easily find in the city is peace: time to relax, to sit back and contemplate your life. And so, I packed my knapsack, slung it on a pole over my shoulder and headed out from London to come live in Haliburton. I came here to gulp down the clean fresh air, to wander through sweet smelling woodlands and to find a more sedate way of life.

That was easier said than done. The trouble is, all you folk are rushing around, taking one, two, three jobs; ferrying the kids from baseball to hockey, to ballet and curling; campaigning for council office, collecting for charity, cutting logs and careering around in speed boats.

We live in what the marketing men of the metropolis would call ‘a time-poor society’. Now, I don’t like the phrase but I get the meaning. There is too much going on in almost all of our lives. We need to find time to go slow every once in a while, to take the weight of our feet, to ‘just chill’, as I believe the young folk are apt to say.  

And so, I recommend to you all a trip to the barbers. There is but one in the area, Bruce’s. It can look intimidating from the exterior, and the clientele will give you a long hard stare when you enter but the proprietor, yep you guessed it, Bruce, will smile offer you a seat and then with a ‘where was I?’ continue his current yarn.

You can join in if you like, or simply sit back and enjoy the banter. It’s blokes’ stuff mainly – the nuances of hunting by bow or catching lake trout; the hopeless state of the Maple Leafs and the best satellite channels to tune into to be mortified by their current form – it’s anything and nothing, the whole world encompassed in conversation that is apt to be peppered with expletives and more than one tall story. The important thing is, though, that you aren’t doing anything else. This forced relaxation. And that’s good.

You can’t book an appointment at Bruce’s but you can calculate the approximate length of your stay by counting the number of gents already seated when you enter. Multiply that number by 15 minutes for each haircut, then add another ten minutes per man as a sort of time-out for Bruce to finish each story. There, you have your duration at the barbers figured out. But that’s not the point and neither is the haircut, really. The joy of visiting the barbershop is in knowing you are in for an hour or so of rib-tickling chat about everything other than worries and work. You’ll leave with a whole host of new knowledge (not all of it trustworthy) a joke or two and a short back and sides. There’ll be no perms, highlights or gel applied at Bruce’s!

Now, our local barber only cuts men’s hair, so ladies, unless you want your nose, ear and eyebrow hair trimming I’d avoid Bruce’s. However, don’t despair, simply pop into your local hairdresser without making an appointment. Turn up a couple of hours before you anticipate needing the haircut and say to the dumbfounded receptionist, ‘oh it’s OK, I’ll wait’. Then, sit back, relax and enjoy time well spent chatting about whatever it is that women chat about in hair salons.

And, if by chance you get any good tips as to where the trout are to be found in spring let me know because no one at the barbers can help!