Bald guy misses the barber, and other laments from COVID Year 0 (plus, the recap)
A part of lockdown life I wasn't ready for, plus the Leafs letting me down, my love for trash, and the Post column that wasn't

Photo Credit: Visitor7.
This may sound like a boast, Code 47 readers. I really don't intend it that way. But I have to acknowledge that me and mine have been relatively lightly hit by COVID-19 and the economic shock. I stayed employed (I actually got busier with freelance, which is great). My wife stayed employed, and our household expenses dropped dramatically, producing a COVID windfall. As a family, our routine has been disrupted, of course, but not in a major way. The biggest losers, sadly, have been the kids, who've lost their activities — we're doing our best to find safe and legally permissible alternatives so their life feels mostly normal.
A lot of this good luck, I figure, is related to our relatively good economic circumstances, but I think a big part of it is also the age of our kids. If they were a bit younger, losing childcare/school and access to family supports would have been much more painful. A bit older, and we'd be dealing with rebellious and hormonal creatures mid-lockdown. I'm not saying there haven't been moments when it's all seemed too much. God knows there has been. But things could have been much worse, and for many, they have been. I count my blessings, believe me.
I was thinking about this this week, wondering what I'll be most happy to do when things go back to normal (or something more like the old normal, at any rate). Being able to see our family, without concerns for our older relatives or those with health conditions, is obviously at the top of the list. The former ease of just popping in to visit my 92-year-old grandmother seems an almost alien concept now. Getting my kids their activities back is high on the list. I miss my monthly or so pub nights with close friends at a favourite local place. I miss hockey, a lot more than I thought I would — especially going to games. I go to quite a few, and as my hockey-mad son has gotten older, we've started travelling further afield to see the Leafs play on the road. Buffalo and Detroit, we've done. Ottawa and Pittsburgh were due. God only knows when that'll be back.
But otherwise ... I personally can live easily this way. What’s lost, I don’t miss. I do worry about my kids missing out on things. And some of my friends I know are truly struggling with profound loss and disruptions to their personal and social lives, with obvious and real consequences on their mental health. But me? I've lost luxuries, and I miss them, but that's it. I can do this. I still have my records and Star Trek on Netflix and books on my ereading apps. I've discovered (though I previously suspected) that I really don't need much beyond the basics to be quite happy. As I've joked on Twitter more than once, in 2020, introversion is a survival advantage.
But I realized this weekend there's something else I miss. An easy, convenient and relaxing barbershop experience.
I saw the pandemic coming before many. I was tuned into the reports of a strange new illness in Wuhan before most people, and was writing about it long before it came to North America — I took some flak for that, and was publicly accused of being alarmist (one particular accuser later publicly recanted in a memorable way). But by February, it was clear to me that it was coming, and I made preparations. My emergency toilet-paper stash was in place about five weeks before everyone else's. (You know what I didn’t get before it was gone, though? Hand sanitizer. Whoops.)

I have this vivid memory of doing a very large, very slow and very methodical grocery shop in early February, back in the "The risk to Canadians is low" era (see above), pushing my cart down all the aisles, consulting a detailed list I'd drawn up, a list that would allow us to largely cut off contact with the outside word for four to six weeks. And what I remember most was realizing that, in that moderately crowded store, while most shoppers were distractedly and cheerfully pushing their carts around without a care in the world, there were two others, a middle-aged guy and a young woman, who were doing the exact same thing that I was. We spotted each other plainly and exchanged small nods. We were obvious to each other, probably because we were on the same frequency.
But you know what never occurred to me? At all? Haircuts.

My daughter gets a haircut at home early in the pandemic.
I was so proud of myself, honestly. I thought I'd thought of everything. But it had simply never crossed my mind that our hair would keep growing during the long months of near-total isolation. The day I realized, I remember feeling like I'd been smacked across the face. It was so obvious in hindsight, but until my wife mentioned that our daughter's hair was getting wild, it honestly just ... never crossed my mind. Once it was pointed out, I was mortified by my oversight. I instantly recalled descriptions from Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, perhaps the defining apocalyptic novel of the contemporary era, of how a post-nuclear-holocaust group of survivors has to figure out barbering.
But for all my detailed planning lists, hair cutting had totally slipped past me.
YouTube tutorials came to the rescue. My wife did a remarkably good job cutting our daughter's hair. My wife just let hers grow out; she'd lucked out with a haircut not long before everything got weird. Ditto my son. But for a bald guy, I'm cursed with the worst-possible-hair scenario: I don't have much, but what I have grows insanely fast. I've long rolled my eyes at this. If I had a full head of hair, I'd want it to grow fast. It would let me do different things with it, knowing I could start over soon if I didn't like a look. As a bald guy, I wish my hair would grow slowly, so that I could mostly ignore what's left. But no, alas. I don't have much, but what I've got grows ridiculously quickly. So we weren't long into the lockdown before I was looking pathetically unkempt. And I hate — hate — when my hair starts spilling over my ears.
Luckily, I have a beard trimmer, and my wife was able to buzz me down to something more reasonable a few times. But when Ontario finally began opening up, basically the only thing I was eager for was a haircut, for myself and my son, who was by that point getting quite shaggy himself. I've had my hair cut four or five times since, and the pandemic-era experience is a very, very poor substitute for the care-free barbershop days of yore.
I like getting my haircut, dammit. I like every part of it. I like the smells, the sensations, the sounds. My local barber is a Syrian-Canadian, trained in old-school barbering, and he's been joined by members of his extended family in recent years, as Syria has fallen apart. They've taken up the craft. It's a terrific shop with hard-working, decent men who know their stuff. I'd go in every two weeks, and they'd get out their buzzers and clippers and scissors and razors and get to work. A trip to the barber is about as close to being pampered as I would normally get. Haircut, beard trim, razor shave around the ears and the back of the neck. If the shop is quiet that day, maybe a full shave, because why not? A shampoo wash after, ending with a massage on the head, neck and shoulders. This was something I'd genuinely look forward to.

Photo Credit: Jose Calvo.
Now? It's the same nice guys and they're working as hard as ever. But there's no time for luxuries or frills. You go in, sign a contact-tracing form, sanitize, go to your chair, get your hair cut while masked, and that's it. Very little time to chat and none of the extras are permitted. I don't look scraggly in the mirror, which is a win, but the pandemic has sucked all the joy out of one of the little pleasures I had come to value in life. And, as is so often the case, I never missed it until it was gone.
This is, I readily grant, a very small "loss" to endure. If this makes anyone's top-five list of gripes with COVID-19, they're doing OK! No doubt. But I confess that I'll be glad when this is all over, because after I've been able to see my family, after I've had that cold beer at the pub, after I've been disappointed by the Leafs from inside Scotia Bank Arena, and after the kids have gotten all their activities in, I'll beat a path right on over to the barbers', and get the works.
And the next time some weird bug comes along and shuts us down again, I won't be floored that our hair doesn't stop growing just because the economy is tanking. I learned that lesson, I swear.
Before the weekly roundup, a quick update on the puppy (yes, some of you have been emailing me for updates — I post them semi-regularly on Twitter). Scotty is great. He had his first vet checkup and passed with flying colours. He is eating a shocking amount and is growing so fast you can almost see it. He's sleeping better, too, thank God, so I'm not quite so fried as I was a week ago. He's still up at least once a night but he's settling better after a trip outside. He's teething and seems to have decided that my son is a chew toy, which isn't great, but we're working on that. Overall, his training is coming along, and despite being as stubborn as a typical basset, he is learning some basic commands. He sometimes even follows them.
I'm glad we have him. Even if he gets stressed out when someone is in the shower and climbs up where the towels go.

I misled you all in last week's letter, saying I had a column due out in the Post. I do! It's coming, I swear. But lining up all the interviews took longer than expected, and I'm still not done yet. I was on standby column-writing duty this week in case the federal government fell, but thank God that didn't happen. So it was, again, a pretty quiet week for me.
As always, I did my weekly video for the Post:
I spent some time chatting with John Gormley on CKOM in Saskatchewan, about the federal election that wasn't. Find that interview here.
At TVO.org, I had two columns. The first, in a refreshing change of pace, had nothing to do with the pandemic, and instead focused on ... trash! Recycling, to be specific: Ontario's blue-bin program is struggling, and announced reforms aren't going to help. China used to buy up our recyclables, turning waste into revenue for our municipalities. But China has stopped buying, and we don't have enough domestic capacity to handle the blue-bin materials. This has gutted the financial basis of our recycling programs, even as Ontario works to expand it.
The reforms and expansions don't address the real problem, I wrote: "Adding more materials to the program will only add to the complexity of a system already struggling to sort useful materials from useless ones; if anything, we should be trying to put more limits on what goes in, so that what actually gets put in the blue box can be profitably sold. It will strain the already reeling domestic-material processors. And it doesn’t do anything to fix the major problem with the funding model — higher costs, lower revenues."
I get weirdly emotionally invested in trash. An efficient municipal waste service is a poorly appreciated lynchpin of modern civilization. But I'll spare you all the speech, if you promise to read the column. Fair?
Also at TVO, I wrote about something else that's poorly appreciated about the pandemic. As much fun as people have shouting at politicians for not opening up fast enough, you can't always blame the politicians. A lot of the time, the real problem is something more mundane, but absolutely essential: legal liability. "We can all scream and shout at one another about what metric is appropriate to permit any given business to reopen, but it’s just wasted oxygen,” I wrote. “Even if you can convince the politician to reopen a class of business — say, dance studios, just to pick an example out of thin air — you’re not going to get anywhere until you also convince the guys who insure the dance studio."
And a funny thing happened. I take no credit; I honestly believe this is 100 per cent a coincidence. But the day after I wrote that column, the Ontario government announced it would take action on that very issue. This is, I say again, a coincidence (and they'll probably botch the effort, anyway). But being made to look prescient in front of your editor is never a bad thing.
That's all for this week, folks. I do have some news I'll be announcing here shortly, but it's not quite time for that yet. So stay tuned, and in the meantime, take care of yourselves. And don't fall behind on your hair styling appointments.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney