Dear Hillary,
After putting it off as I was so busy, I just had to get a haircut or a violin. Since I can’t play any musical instruments at all and don’t want to take violin lessons at my age, I went to my usual barbers, to find it was closed. This was something new to me, so I drove around to see the next one, and it was closed as well. Asking around with my friends, I was told that all barbers close on Wensdays (sic) and it was a Wensday (sic) that I was looking at getting the locks shorn. Can you tell me why they all want to shut on that day? I had to spend the rest of the afternoon in the pub instead. Is it a government rule or what?
Just sign me Harry the Hair.
Dear Harry the Hair,
Aren’t you lucky, it was just the Bar-ber that was closed, and not the Bar-beer! That would have been a national disaster. Pre-warning Harry, the Thai national elections are coming up and the Bar-beers all have to close, so you and your drinking mates should lay in a stock of the amber fluid now to get you over the election days. Your friends were correct, by the way. The barbers do close on Wednesday (write out the correct spelling 100 times, Petal). It is not a government (write this one out 100 times as well) rule, but comes from the fact that we consider it to be bad luck to cut your hair on a Wednesday, so the clever barbers may as well close, rather than spread the bad luck. It is something like the old religious edict of “no meat on Fridays” overseas, which gave the butchers a holiday as well. Don’t go looking for a gold shop on Saturdays either. That’s their holiday.
