Cut the Sides Don’t Touch the Back

Every country has its coifered peculiarities – God knows, the eighties fright cuts and emo fringes kicking around in the U.K before we left were amusing the hell out of me. But the haircuts on some of the workmen and boy racer types in Australia truely are something to behold. There is a version of the Hoxton Fin (you know the one sported by Beckham and Fran Healy about seven years ago where the hair on top of your head is brushed up into a pointy ridge). However, imagine if the fin sliped further and further towards the back of your head until the pointy ridge ran down your nape. But the main reason for my post is that this is mullet country.

Back in the U.K, when I spent more time listening to the Beasty Boys, my friends and I had classifications for mullets. I think this was a popular sport back then. A women with a mullet had a Shmullet. A bald guy attempting the business-up-front-party-down-back look had a Bullet. A permed flock of hill-billy mane was a Pullet. And so on.

Now, I haven’t thought about this haircut for a while, but Australia provides fertile ground for adding to the classification. One version seems to be a sort of localised afro on the back of the head (this is favoured by some of the local rev-heads) which doesn’t really hang so much as coagulate. I’ve christened this the Frollet. Another involves having the hair all over the head reasonably short except for the very last threads of the hairline on the neck which are grown to maybe only a couple of inches. This proto-mullet is most prominently sported by a local “singer” called Shanon Noll. Hence I’ve called it the Nollet.

There also numerous pissed up versions of rats tails which seem to emerge from entirely random parts of the back of the head – behind the left ear, the top right back corner of the head. I’d try to get some pictures but I’d probably get smacked. Each to his own, and I guess you can’t fault them for so stridently embracing the forbidden hair. But seriously, even Billy-Ray Sirus has given up the Achy-Brakey hair, and that guy was committed.

You Can Hear It In My Accent When I Talk

As you will notice, by user name, Telbort, is a bit odd  (but not very). The reason I use it for this blog is that some Sydneysiders have struggled to understand my accent. An Australian Coffee shop chain called Gloria Jean’s take your order and type in your name in the till which appears on a screen so the person making the drinks can call it out when your coffee is ready. When I gave my name, Albert, the guy on the till looked at me as though I’d just called him a bad thing. I’m used to this. I’m not that old and most people see ”Albert” as an old person’s name. So I repeated it. He asked me to spell it. Still looked like I’d called him a bad name. Anyway, when my order was called it turned out they had made a regular flat white (this is what the Aussies call white coffee) for Telbort.

Of course, my accent isn’t so mangled as to turn “Albert” into “Telbort” for all Aussies, but I get asked to repeat myself a lot. Also, my wife was told by a guy in a phone shop that her accent was very English. She quite liked that. I just wondered what it meant to sound merely English (as opposed to *very* English), or what it meant to sound a little bit English (like Rene Zellweger’s in Bridget Jones say). Still not sure.