Waiting for Godalming

1

Now you don’t really see barber’s shops any more. They’ve gone the way of the Pathe News and Raylbrook Poplin, the shirts you don’t iron. But once, in a time not too long ago, the barber’s shop was a very special place. A shrine to all things male.

Here men of every social order gathered for their bi-weekly trims. The gentry rubbed shoulders with the genetically deficient, princes with paupers, wide boys with window dressers. Here was egalitarianism made flesh. Here was a classless society. Here all men were equal beneath the barber’s brush.

A mile due north of Brentford, as the fair griffin flies, the Ealing Road enters South Ealing and for a space of one hundred yards becomes its high street. And here, in the high street, hard upon the left hand path, betwixt a wool shop, where the wives of wealthy men felt yarn, and a flower shop where they fondled floral fripperies, there stood at the time when our tale is told, a barber’s shop that went by the name of Stravino’s.

And Stravino’s was a barber’s shop as a barber’s shop should be.

Above the door and rising proud as a porn star’s pecker, the red and white striped pole, encased within a cylinder of glass and powered by an unseen engine, spiralled ever towards infinity. The front and only window, bathed on rare occasions by bob-a-jobbing Boy Scouts, displayed in ten-by-eights of gloss-gone monochrome the fashionable haircuts of a bygone day. The face of King Gillette, creator of that famous blade of blue, stared sternly from a box of safety razors. And dead flies, belly up, arrayed themselves in pleasing compositions.

Bliss.

Ah, perfect bliss.

But if ’twere bliss to view it from without, then what of it within?

Ah, well, within.

’Twere poetry within.

For

Stravino’s shop was long and low

With walls of a nicotine hue.

The floor was ankle-deep in hair

And if you dared to stand and stare,

That hair would soon be round your leg

And filling up your shoe.

The Greek himself was a colourful man

Who rejoiced in the name of Smiling Stan

And worked his trade with great élan

And sang some opera too.

There were hot towels in a chromium drum

And a row of cinema chairs

Where the patrons sat to await their turns

And savour the screams from the hot towel burns

And open the old brown envelope

And dodge the flying hairs.

For the Greek could snip with incredible zest

He’d have at your head like a man possessed

And few could help but be impressed

By his knowledge of cosmic affairs.

And so on and so forth for many verses more. But we have not come here to versify. We have come here with a purpose and that is to meet the hero for our tale.

For the present, he is unaware that he is the hero. Indeed, by the looks of him, he seems hardly cut from that cloth of which heroes are tailored. He is slender, slightly stooped and sits with downcast eyes, patiently awaiting his turn for a trim. He speaks to no-one and no-one speaks to him. He is eighteen years of age and his name is Icarus Smith.

It’s a good name for a hero, Icarus Smith. Encompassing, as it does, both the mythic and the mundane. But other than his having a good name for a hero, what can there be said about the man who bears this name?

Well.

If you were to approach young Mr Smith and ask that he recommend himself, he would like as not ignore you. But if the mood to communicate was upon him, as seldom it was without a good cause, for he rarely spoke to anyone other than himself, he would probably say that he considered himself to be an honest God-fearing fellow, who meant harm to no man and called each man his brother.

His brother by birth, however, might well choose to take issue with this particular statement, letting it be known that in his opinion, Icarus was nothing more than a thieving godless ne’er do well.

But then that’s brothers for you, isn’t it? And Icarus, for his part, considered his brother to be barking mad.

So can any man be truly judged by the opinions of others, no matter how close to the man himself those others might be? Surely not. By a man’s deeds shall you know him, said the sage, and by his deeds was Icarus known.

To most of the local constabulary.

He did not consider himself to be a thief. Anything but. Icarus considered himself to be a “relocator”. One who practised the arts and sciences of relocation. And to him this was no euphemism. This was a way of life and a mighty quest to boot.

To Icarus, the concept of “ownership” was mere illusion. How, he argued, could any man truly “own” anything except the body that clothed his consciousness?

Certainly you could acquire things and hold on to them for a while and you could call this “ownership”. But whatever you had, you would ultimately lose. Things break. Things wear out. Things go missing. You die and leave the things that you “owned” to others, who in turn will “own” them for a while.

You could try like the very bejasus to “own” things, but you never really truly would. And if you didn’t hang on like the very bejasus to the things that you thought you owned, then like as not you wouldn’t “own” them for very long.

For they would be relocated by Icarus Smith. Or if not relocated by Icarus Smith, then simply stolen by some thieving godless ne’er do well.

Now for the cynics out there, who might still be labouring under the mistaken opinion that relocating is merely thieving by another name, let this be said: Icarus had not become a relocator by choice. He was an intelligent lad and could have turned his hand to almost anything in order to earn himself a living. But Icarus had dreamed a dream, a terrible dream it was, and this dream had changed the life of Icarus Smith.

Icarus had dreamed the Big Picture. The Big Picture of what was wrong with the world and the method by which he could put it to rights. And when you dream something like that, it does have a tendency to change your life somewhat.

In the dream of Icarus Smith, he had seen the world laid out before him as the Big Picture. People coming and going and doing their things and it all looked fine from a distance. But the closer Icarus looked, the more wrong everything became. The Big Picture was in fact a jigsaw puzzle with everyone’s lives and possessions slotted together. But it was a jigsaw that had been assembled by a madman. A mad God perhaps? The more closely Icarus examined the pieces, the more he became aware that they didn’t fit properly. They were all in the wrong places and had been hammered down in order to make them fit.

Icarus realized that if he could take out a piece here and replace it with a piece from over there and move that other bit across there and shift that bit up a bit and so on and so forth and so on and so forth and—

He had awoken in a terrible sweat.

But he had seen the Big Picture.

And he had found his vocation in life. As a relocator.

Icarus realized that the world could be changed for the better by relocating things. By putting the right things into the right people’s hands and removing the wrong things from the wrong people’s hands.

It was hardly a new idea; Karl Marx had come up with something similar a century before. But sharing out the wealth of the world equally amongst everyone had never been much of an idea. Anyone with any common sense at all realized that a week after the wealth had been distributed, some smart blighter would have wangled much more than his fair share from the less than smart blighters and the world would be back where it started again.

It had to be done differently from that.