Bit of a hodge-podge today, mostly arising from last week’s blog post. Let’s dive right in.

Two of my originally American readers encountered what was, for them, a new word last week: anti-macassar. One googled it, and thanked me for teaching him a new word. “I didn’t even know those had a name,” he admitted. This, I suspect, is because, while Victorian men were applying macassar to their hair, American men were taming the Wild West. To each his own.

The other friend confronted me in shul, to ask about anti-macassars, because she strives, commendably, to minimise her digital footprint, and chose to ask me rather than Google. I must confess to finding that rather flattering. I must, however, admit, that I have subsequently confirmed and fleshed out the answer I gave her by plunging down a number of google rabbit-holes, all so that you don’t have to.

So, our story begins in Sulawesi (as so many do), although at the time that our story begins, it was known as Celebes. One of Indonesia’s major islands, Sulawesi boasts, on its Western coast, a major port by the name of Macassar. I won’t give you its entire history, but the first mention of Macassar is in the Nagarakretagama, which you hardly need me to tell you was a 14^th-Century eulogy to the king of the Mahajapit empire, which was, as if you needed reminding, a Javanese Hindu-Buddhist thalassocratic empire. (A thalassocracy, for those of you who slept through Ancient Greek at school, is a state or nation that acquires maritime supremacy over a large area of sea, rather than land. The Vikings are probably the example most of us are more familiar with (not first-hand, you understand), but Mahajapit (also known, confusingly, as Wilatikta) extended over almost the entirety of the Nusantara archipelago.) But I digress.

Skipping lightly over the Portuguese (1513), the Sultan of Gowa (1545), the Dutch (always a good idea to skip over them) (1605), Islamisation (1607), the English (1613), the Dutch again (1667), the Chinese (1730s), the Dutch yet again (1906), the Japanese (1942) and the Australians (1945), Macassar eventually became the capital of the newly declared State of East Indonesia in 1946 and was renamed Ujungpandang in 1971.

Incidentally, just to confuse matters, there is another Macassar in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. When the Dutch East India Company expelled a local Muslim religious and civil leader, Sheik Yusuf, from Macassar to South Africa, he was such a prominent figure that the settlement he founded, which became a centre for spreading the message of Islam to the Capetown slave community, became known as Macassar in his honour. Rather as if a neighbourhood were renamed Nantymoel because that’s the town in Wales that Bernice and I came on aliya from. But I digress.

We take up our story again in late 18^th-Century London, where barbers would concoct hair preparations for which they claimed astonishing powers, and sell them to an eager public for considerably more than they cost to prepare. One such barber was Alexander Rowland, and, from the moment he began offering his customers Rowland’s Macassar oil, it was a resounding hit. Undoubtedly, this was partly because of the name. Probably, some customers believed the oil was an extrusion of the macassar ebony, a very handsome wood, deep brown or black with striking yellowish brown streaks, native to Indonesia. In fact, the oil was almost certainly originally an extrusion of the schleichera oleosa (rather a less catchy name for a tree), or gum lac tree (the name tells you all you need to know), also native to Indonesia and, indeed, the whole of Southeast Asia. Let us be generous to Alexander, and assume that the ships that carried the oil for import to Britain left from the port of Macassar.

Whether or not, a couple of decades of aggressive and very effective advertising that made extravagant claims about the product transforming a bald pate into a luscious head of hair established it as a firm national favourite; at some point, Rowland began preparing it from the cheaper and more readily available ingredients coconut oil and ylang ylang (a tropical tree still valued for the essential oils extracted from its flowers, which has a strong floral fragrance).

Impressively, having once been Prince Albert’s favoured hair preparation, Rowland’s macassar oil remained in continuous production until 1954 (in other words for 161 years), when the company went into liquidation. However, do not despair. An enterprising gent by the name of Shane O’Shaughnessy left the world of IT to return to his grandfather’s barbering business, and, in 2012, revived some of his grandfather’s preparations, including macassar oil. So, the anti-macassars on our new lounge suite (of which, incidentally, we took delivery this past Sunday) are not a mere whimsical touch on our part, but may well prove extremely useful if some hirsute English fop or dandy chooses to pay us a visit.

I can’t leave the world of tonsorial taming without mentioning that cricketing and football hero of my youth, Denis Compton. Compton played both football and cricket for England, but it was as a cricketing batsman that he is best remembered – one of the finest England produced (in an era where it produced a good few), he set several records that are still unbroken. In a very early example of sports sponsorship, Compton became the famous face – or, rather, hairline – of Brylcreem, the 1940s and 50s heir of macassar oil, a brilliantine cream that both controlled and gave a sheen to men’s hair.

Compton earned £1000 a year (the equivalent of just under £45000 today), which was a huge amount by the standards of the time. To put this in context, I haven’t been able to find stats for cricketer’s salaries in 1950, but a footballer earned £14 a week, or £728 a year, so Compton did pretty well from his sponsorship.

At this point, you may well be wondering why this obsession with matters tonsorial. I must admit I was wondering that myself, until the penny dropped a few minutes ago. The truth is, I’m feeling a little vulnerable, so I hope I can rely on you to lend a sympathetic ear (or, more accurately, eye, unless you’re using one of those AI text readers).

Ever since I first noticed, some decades ago, that I have what I always preferred to refer to as an aggressive forehead, I have been coming to terms with the fact that the thick mop of hair I enjoyed in my twenties and thirties seemed destined to have a shorter shelf life than most of the rest of me. (On reading that last sentence, Bernice suggested that I never had a thick mop of hair. Recollections, as Her Majesty observed, may differ.) I gave up going to the barber about fifteen years ago, when he insisted on charging me full price, even though I was in the chair barely long enough to warm the seat. Since then, Bernice has been trimming my locks, and a very fine job she has done of it, too.

However, in recent years, it has been an increasing challenge for my shaver’s trimmer attachment to grab hold of my hair to cut it, there being less and less of my hair to grab hold of. Last week, it took Bernice repeated passes over the back and sides to trim them (there having been nothing on top for some considerable time). When she had finished, I came to the conclusion that the game was no longer worth the candle. It had been taking Bernice longer and longer to cut my thinner and thinner hair, and, I felt, we were now so close to the point where it would take her an infinite amount of time to cut an infinitesimally small amount of hair that, in short, we had reached the end of the barbering road.

So, from the trimming chair, I went straight to the bathroom, and shaved off all of the remaining hair at the side of my head. (‘All’ is rather a grand term for the quantity involved, but the principle holds.) This included shaving off my sideburns, which were considerably fuller. I left the sparse undergrowth at the back, where I could not see it. The result was that, when I looked in the mirror, I appeared completely bald.

In the week since then, I have learnt a number of important lessons. One: if you plan to shave your head, try to avoid choosing the very week where a previously interminable summer dips suddenly and dramatically into winter. Two: a short, stubbly, head-covering of hair, in combination with a fairly coarse-crocheted kippa, creates a Velcro-like effect that secures the kippa to your head surprisingly better than you might have expected. (I had, in anticipation of serious challenges in this department, ordered a healthy length of wig tape, which, as I write, has cleared Israeli customs, and should be arriving in the next few days. I have no idea whether it will be effective, but I look forward to finding out.)

Three (and this is the painful part of this whole story): I wondered how people would react to this new tonsorial look, and it has been a very bitter pill to swallow to discover that scarcely anyone has noticed. This forces me to the painful conclusion that, over the last couple of years, I have been labouring under the misapprehension that I have been living under a head of hair at all. Clearly, I was, to all intents and purposes, bald long before I shaved my head.

Don’t get me wrong. Having taken the plunge, I am very happy with the result, not least because I have made four other very positive discoveries. One: I will never need to buy another packet of kippa clips. Two: all those much too small kippot that I had been saving for no reason are now a perfect size. Three: the bottle of shampoo that I suspected might see me out I can now sell, because shampoo is something that lives for me only in the past. Four: I have shaved not only my head but also a couple of minutes off my showering time. One sponge with one squirt of shower gel now does me top to toe, I am already planning what to do with my extra half-an-hour a week.

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, next week, I promise, will be a hair-free post.