Page 17 - COBH EDITION 20th DECEMBER DIGITAIL VERSION

But if that sounds excessive, spare a thought for Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah who pays
an average of €24,000 to his barber who is flown, first class, to wherever in the
world the Sultan happens to be, whenever he feels like a trim.

That’s all very well for those who have the hair and the money to look after it but
what about those who don’t have much of either? For those characters there is
always the wig or the toupee. The difference between the two, apparently, is that a
wig is a full set of hair while a toupee is designed to cover a specific small bald spot.
When you see the state of some of these things, you’d wonder how baldness
wouldn’t be a better option. Some wigs are so bad that they draw attention to the
baldness instead of disguising it.

In ancient Greece, natural hair was viewed as sacred. In fact, Greeks would often
hang the hair of the dead on the door before burial, and mourners would cut their
own hair and place it on the corpse as a mark of respect.

Wigs are worn for many reasons. People who have lost all or part of their own hair
due to illness or natural baldness often use them to disguise the condition or maybe
to help them to feel a little more confident about themselves. Others use them to
alter their appearance like those in the entertainment industry.

Whatever we feel about toupees and wigs, some people just feel better about them-
selves when they have their heads covered. Maybe there are some really good ones
that are so effective, we don’t even know that they are toupees, but the opposite is
certainly true.

There must be some practical issues with wearing these things too, such as trying
to keep them in place in the wind and keeping them clean. I imagine it must be like
wearing a hat so presumably it gets warm indoors or in the sun.

All in all, you’d imagine that life would be easier all around if people could just con-
cede to nature. Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas had very successful film careers and
they didn’t have a strand of hair between them, so baldness obviously isn’t the end
of the world.

There was a guy who worked in Cobh about forty years ago. Tommy Murphy was his
name and he was from Wexford and he always had a full beard. The kind of beard
you could hide things in. I remember one occasion when he came back to Cobh
after being away for a few weeks, a gang of us met up and we sat around a table
having some grub and chatting.

We were sitting there for a good while before somebody eventually noticed that
Tommy had shaved off the beard. Up to that point none of us had spotted it.

Just goes to show that it’s the person we see rather than the hair so maybe we re-
ally shouldn’t be getting too hung up about it after all.

Read more from Trevor on his blog at www.trevorlaffan.com