Where are all the proper members’ clubs?

‘How would you like your hair cut?’ ‘In silence.’ So goes the ancient joke. My answer, however, is ‘at home’. You see, this week marks the 15th anniversary of having my hair cut in my Highgate flat by the great Jane Davies, peripatetic barber to London’s loucher gentry. (Just as Jeeves is not a butler, so Jane is not a hairdresser.) In 1970, Jane left her Cromwell Road convent and, with scissors in hand, descended to a smoke-filled basement on Sloane Street. Here Vidal Sassoon had established a speakeasy barbershop for men who wanted their locks left groovily long. Some 15 years later, Jane went freelance, but rather than open a salon or hire a chair, she visited her clients at home. Such domesticity suits a snipper-up of unconsidered trifles, and Jane is blessed with a miscellanist’s mindset and Borgesian library of books, pamphlets, clippings and photographs. It’s not uncommon to return home to a hand-delivered oddity relating to a recent mid-cut conversation; her envelopes are always labelled ‘Hair Mail’.