His shop was empty. There was no waiting. The barber delightedly welcomed me into his chair. Was I Iooking forward to the start of the new football season? Who did I support? Was it them over there? (He pointed with his head to the football stadium just across the road.) He was a Manchester United supporter, he said proudly, running the clippers up the sides of my head. Everybody at home in Mauritius supported the Red Devils: his brothers and sisters, his father, his grandfather, his uncles.
He was a chatterbox. I was glad: I hadn’t spoken to a soul all day. But on hearing he was a Manchester United supporter, I immediately lost confidence in his intelligence.
Conscious, perhaps, of his fall from grace he changed the subject and asked me how business was. He’d never known things this bad.
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