12 February 2025

I am a man who orders combs when drunk

For £14, I’ve bought something that will remain ornamental – unless I turn it into a kazoo, which will not happen however much I drink.

By Nicholas Lezard

The doorbell has been unusually busy of late. I might have mentioned before that it makes a particularly horrible noise: an angry buzz, as if from a wasp the size of the moon. (This house, like Prospero’s isle, is full of noises: every Tuesday morning at ten to nine they test the fire alarm, and the racket is so loud it makes the doorbell sound like a murmured sweet nothing from a tender lover. But I digress.) It’s been busy because the other tenants have been doing a lot of online shopping. The delivery drivers buzz each flat in turn; eventually they get to mine, and I buzz them in because I’m the only one in during the day. Only I can’t buzz them in any more, as my intercom doesn’t work. So whether I go downstairs to let them in depends on my mood, and whether I’m wearing any trousers. The doorbell used to mean there was a high probability of a bailiff, so my policy was very straightforward: never answer the door.

Yesterday was particularly trying. A young lady, almost certainly a student, had put the house address as her own by mistake and had been told her package had been delivered; only it hadn’t. She came back a few times to see whether it had, and even showed me a photo taken by the driver of a hand about to push a squishy package through what looked very much like the house’s letterbox. She looked at me suspiciously, obviously wondering whether I had pinched her parcel. I could see her thought processes in her eyes, and she was wondering whether I was not only a thief but also a cross-dresser (for her parcel contained clothes).

“Are there any… women who live here?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. I liked that pause before “women”, as if she was wondering what the right word to use in the circumstances was. By the time of her third visit, I felt we had got to know each other fairly well. (After the first visit, I noticed that my flies were undone. That was a little upsetting for both of us.)

Then the door went again, but instead of my new friend it was a delivery person with a parcel for me. How exciting! A cuboid cardboard box, about six inches on each side, and very light. Back inside the Hove-l, I opened it: a comb.

If you could see my head, you’d find this hilarious, for just two days ago I had wearied of my wild, grizzled locks – the tufty bits that develop on the corners made me look like a mad owl – and gone to see Claudia, who expertly shears me, leaving me looking as though I have just been drafted, or committed to a penal institution. Around my chair the hair falls like dirty snow. I’ve been going to her barbershop for years now. She asked me how my Christmas had been and I told her about cooking for the family for both the Eve and the Day and she said: “You must have been a terrible husband to be so nice now.” I conceded she had a point.

Anyway, a comb – and a very nice one, too: a Mason Pearson one that looks as though it’s made from tortoiseshell but probably isn’t. They are so posh that even with that English-sounding name they are made in Switzerland, like James Bond. I have no doubt that Bond combs his dark locks with a Mason Pearson. Be that as it may, for at least the next month it is going to be as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.

A memory slowly surfaced: of me, a few drinks in, at the laptop… it turned out that the satirist who had sent me a comb was in fact me. So this is what I do when I’m drunk, I thought. Well, it could be worse. I once wrote, and then sent off, a couple of poems to Stand magazine when I was so plastered I couldn’t even remember writing them, and no one was more astonished than me when the magazine landed on the doormat with my poems inside it. Some people, when under the influence, send tearful messages to their exes. What do I do? I buy combs, and send poetry to highly regarded poetry magazines. I don’t think I’ll try it with the poetry again: lightning won’t strike there twice, I feel.

I went through my secondary email folders and there it was: an order for a Mason Pearson comb, for nearly £14. Christ, I must have been steaming. Fourteen quid for something that for almost all of its life will be purely ornamental, unless I turn it into a kazoo, which will not happen however much I drink.

Still, it’s not exactly rock bottom, is it? I can’t really imagine coming out with My Comb Shame at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. My Poetry Shame might get a bit more traction, but then again everyone else might think I’m a bit of a knob. Then I thought back to Claudia, and her piercing insight into the collapse of the Lezard marriage. Ah. I think alcohol might have played a certain part in that. But right now it’s doing no one any harm except myself. And I can imagine the good people at the chemists, from whom I ordered the comb, dancing a little jig. (“We sold one! Fourteen quid! What a mug.”) I like to spread a little happiness wherever I go these days.

[See also: Visions of an English occult]