William Poole manages to avoid small talk on a trip to the hairdresser

Going to the barber shop should be a calming experience but I dread it: it’s the small-talk. “On holiday today?” “No, I’m an academic, we’re just idle.” “Busy in town with tourists, isn’t it?” “Kill them all, the Lord will know his own.” “Going somewhere this vacation?” “The Bodleian.” “Well, it’ll be nice weather there, I guess.” “Mmm.” “Friendly kind of chap, aren’t you?”

Instead I sit looking in horror as all these silver tears course down my barber’s bib.

When did this happen?

When did I get so old and crocodilic, all leather and iron filings?

A line of poetry suddenly came into my head — don’t worry, I’m not always wandewing wonewy as a cwowd — from the great late medieval Scottish poet, William Dunbar.

‘Saint Salvator, send silver sorrow.’ This was my silver sorrow, its tiny metallic shards dropping about my boots.

It’s not often that an entirely alliterated line of poetry works.

Dunbar’s line is actually not about hair but money — he is asking the King, James IV, for some cash in recompense for his verse. I doubt it was forthcoming. James IV subsequently got himself killed in the catastrophe of Flodden Field on September 9, 1513, when many of the Scottish nobility were wiped out.

One of them was Alexander Stuart, an illegitimate son of the King, who had been nominated Archbishop of St Andrews at the age of 11, and by 17 he was Lord Chancellor of Scotland. Three years later he was dead in battle, mourned by the great scholar Erasmus, who had taught him Greek at Padua.

Last year was the 500th anniversary of the disaster at Flodden Field, and we didn’t hear much about it from Scotland, for obvious reasons.

I am now very worried that the Scots are heading for a modern Flodden Field this September.

You have to admire the vigour, the sure touch of the ‘no’ campaign: David Cameron has even taken a Scottish nanny, for his children, which will surely cement the Union.

‘Saint Salvator, send silver sorrow.’ If only it were just a question of cash.

Dunbar was a man of attitude. I greatly admire his vicious clowning.

He was said to have visited Oxford, mainly as there is a poem attributed to him called Dunbar at Oxinfurde.

In it he admonished the local academics for “exercising” their “crafts” without considering the ends to which their scholarship should be put, for failing to match their deeds to their words: “Without gud lyfe all in the selfe dois de.” (‘De’ is ‘die’, if you didn’t get that.) “A paralus (i.e. ‘perilous’) seikness is vane properitie!” cried the Scotsman to the fat dons.

“A parlus seikness!” I found myself babbling lustily in rusty Scots at the barber’s mirror.

Whoops, I thought. Must stop talking to myself in public.

The barber looked straight into my eyes via the mirror with his twisty grin: some funny old clowns we get in here.

Dr William Poole is a tutor in English and Fellow at New College. He is researching intellectual and scientific history