It is, accordingly, a matter of mirth in certain sections of Davern's town in the West of Ireland that he still visits the barber every fortnight without fail. Every second Friday evening, regular as clockwork, he marches into Fawl's Barber Shop and has the haircut which he has been having there since the first time his mother brought him to Fawls at the age of about eight or nine years. Then in was old Tommy Fawl that was the barber, now it is Young Tommy who, quite frankly is not Young Tommy at all any more, well into his fifties, and, like so many barbers as bald as an egg himself. No, that's not true. Young Tommy Fawl is not as bald as an egg either.
Nobody really is.
But he's getting there. Now if you were a mirthful man, and I have a tendency that way, and if you were in Fawls Barbershop on one of those second Fridays, as I have been recently, then you might be inclined to make a fool of yourself by going into fits of laughter at the sight of two big bald heads, one of them attached to arms with barber's tools, heavily involved in the business of cutting away hairs which have not needed to be cut at all for the last twenty years. To be honest I almost died at the sight of Young Tommy solemnly snipping away at virtually nothing for the best part of ten minutes, which is true, and then, the Lord between us and all harm, at last holding up a mirror to the back of Davern's hugely shiny dome and asking him if he was satisfied. And I nearly did lose the run of myself, truly, when Fawl shook out absolutely nothing visible from the cloth that had been shrouding Davern during the operation. And then briskly deployed the brush to brush away absolutely nothing from the muscled shoulders of Davern.