Has anyone else noticed the recent proliferation of barber’s shops in Oxford? Their sudden spread is particularly observable in East Oxford. Cycling along Cowley Road earlier this week I counted at least ten — a few more if you include hairdressers catering for both sexes. St Clement’s is another growth area — my pun is deliberate — and there is a new sprouting, too, (ditto) at the other side of Magdalen Bridge on the High. The newest shop there impressed me with its offer before Christmas of free haircuts for the homeless.

I would welcome readers’ ideas about what is causing this explosion. That barbers are doing for small retail properties what charity shops are doing for the larger ones — finding a use for them — is perhaps understandable. Presumably, business start-up costs are low, with nothing to buy in terms of stock, and chairs, clippers and scissors, driers, combs and brushes, sinks and mirrors all the equipment that is required — sorry, forgot the sprays, gels and colouring agents so necessary to modern tonsorial titivation. But where are all the new customers coming from? Where, indeed, the new hairdressers, for I notice ‘Barber Required’ signs in many of the shop windows?

It is all a far cry from the situation as it was in the city when I first got to know it in the 1970s. No Market Barber in the Covered Market or nearby Dukes Barbers in Golden Cross Walk (where, I see from the Internet, they offer free beer on Saturday afternoons). The choice for a haircut, to the best of my recollection, was between Walter’s in the Turl, Shepherd and Woodward (now closed) or the High Street Barbers, still in operation near The Queen’s College. In East Oxford I can, at present, think only of the one-time Oxford city councillor Dennis W. Pratley, who remains hard at work in his Hertford Street shop and sometimes chatting to passers-by — I was one a couple of years back — on the pavement outside.

As it happens, the boom in barbers has occurred at precisely the moment when I have ceased to need them. Blessed for the past decade with little in the way of hair — on top, at least — I have during most of this time called at Walter’s every few weeks for what is known as a clipper cut. The clippers are passed across the head with an attachment on the blades to harvest hair at the desired length, very short in my case. Sometimes the operation was performed at one of the Cowley Road barber’s shops which are conveniently open on Sundays. I’d choose whichever was empty.

But last autumn these visits became unnecessary when I obtained clippers of my own. I bought them, brand-new and still sealed in their box, at a sale in support of animal rescue on the Greek island of Naxos.

They cost €10, rather less than I was paying for every visit to the barber’s. My initial worry was that self-barbering might not be easy, but happily this proved groundless. I found I was able to do a job indistinguishable from a professional’s, even round the back of my head and neck, which I can do by feel. I have performed three cuts now, pleased to think of all the money I have saved.

It was the desire to save money, I dare say, that lay behind the event that constitutes my earliest memory of a barber’s. This was the occasion when, aged perhaps seven, I was sent back to the shop when my mother decided that the short back and sides performed there was not, in her judgment, short enough. It was with some embarrassment that I asked for the further attention in the chair that would ensure longevity to the cut.

In fact, I was not actually in the chair but seated on a plank of wood placed across its arms — the 1950s approach to adjustable seating. How vividly I recall the intimidating, frighteningly adult scene I viewed from this eminence. The air was thick with pipe and cigarette smoke — imagine that today! — and the talk was mainly of football and betting. Next to me a barber might be doing something to another customer involving a thin lighted candle — this was singeing, to deal with split ends — or perhaps inquiring if he needed “something for the weekend”.

And there were the adverts. “Will not stain pillows and chair backs.” “A little bead is all you need.” Tru-gel, as other oldies might remember . . .