All I want is a cup of coffee and a haircut

Picture: Facebook/Caffe Nero

I've got to that stage in the lockdown when it's become a matter of priorities. I've accepted that, probably, I won't get to see a Mediterranean beach this year and if I was to scale up the scope of disappointments, it's unlikely that I'll be spending any face-to-face quality time with the new colleagues I've only been working with since April. Stir craziness has yet to kick in, largely thanks to now living in a house with a garden, and with the occasional (don't tell my GP) breakout for fresh air and exercise. Last Saturday we ventured into the Surrey Hills and, not to overdo it, it was fantastic: a triple whammy of sunshine, an abundance of green and blue in the colour scheme, and a widescreen view to replace the 4:3 constraint of the living room windows I spend most of the time looking out of.

We've accepted that lockdown is a compromise, and quite a simple one to accept: you stay at home, you don't die. I'm quite down with that. And even if we start to consider creative alternatives to the traditional ten days somewhere relatively exotic, the prospect of caravan park staycations which may have hitherto been sniffed at, all of a sudden look quite attractive. I even spent Sunday drooling over a Sunday Times feature on campervan rentals. A 2-litre Volkswagen T6 California Ocean, with fitted kitchen, rooftop beds and furniture discreetly contained within the door panels, is now looking very viable (for full disclosure, I have also started watching cookery shows and Location, Location, Location, such is the need for escapism).

But to return to my original point, lockdown may have allowed the mind to wander, but clearly not everything is possible. So I've had to pare back my ambition and settle on just two things I need more than anything else to restore order: a decent cup of barista-poured coffee and a haircut. In the case of the former, I recognise that it is somewhat bourgeois. The Nespresso coffee pods we have do the job perfectly well. But thanks to 26 years of Friends repeats, the suggested ambiance of a bare brick-lined Caffè Nero has, tragically, become hard-wired into my needs. And even if pesky medical considerations have forced me to abandon lattes and cappuccinos for the bog-standard Americano (and decaf, too), the absence of an hour's quality time with family or friends, or simply in contemplation solitario, has, I've become creepingly aware, left a massive hole in my life.

Arguably less critical, depending on where you stand on such things, is the haircut. I very wisely visited my preferred barber of three decades just before the lockdown, requesting a neat short back and sides à la Daniel Craig (because, clearly, the current 007 and I share so many physical attributes...). That was in mid-March. It is now almost June. While my Barnet hasn't quite gone the full Castaway, it is now annoying me and my other half, with grey strands I'm normally in denial over poking out like twigs in a garden refuse bag, and a luxuriant mop developing on top that will, soon, resemble one of those awful men's hairdos you used see in pictures on the walls of hairdressing establishments in the 1970s.

So, coffee and a haircut. Not much to ask for. My spiritual cousins in Italy are now emerging from their own lockdown with much the same needs to fulfil, except they have discovered - and this may well be the pattern for us here in the UK - that things have changed. The Times today reports that, amongst a basket of everyday essentials that have received price hikes in Italy, the price of coffee and perfect hair (commodities that actually transcend the term "essential" in Italy ) has gone up, quite a bit. In Rome, an espresso that would have cost Eur 1.10 before the lockdown now costs Eur 1.50, a 40-cent increase that has left Romans horrified. Even worse for the Milanese, where espressos have been hiked as high as two euros. If you didn't know already, the morning shot of black goodness is a quasi-religious ritual in Italy, which is why there is increasing indignation. "We are reporting those cafés to Italy’s anti-trust authority,” Stefano Zerbi of the consumer group Codacons told The Times. "We remember how prices were all rounded up when Italy moved from the lira to the euro in 1999, but this is much worse."

Haircare has seen an even more inflationary increase. Italians venturing out, gingerly, to get their locks trimmed under surgical levels of socially-distanced, PPE-protected hygiene, have been met with bills of Eur 40, a full ten euros more for a cut than before the lockdown. On a more serious note, Italy's hairdressers and myriad coffee bars are typical of the country's small businesses struggling for cash and being driven to Mafia-linked loan sharks. Italy's national anti-loan-sharking association says that complaints from businesses have risen by more than 50 per cent in recent months, another sad indictment of the prevailing influence of organised crime in Italian society.

But while sympathetic to the Italian cause, and not wishing to descend into flippancy, I'm the kind of sucker that would not baulk at price hikes for a sniff of good coffee and a trim. Even if these industries emerge from the coronavirus crisis as black market items, I can easily see myself giving in to my normal principles about contraband in order to satisfy two needs that simply can't be properly fulfilled, either by the gurgling machine in our kitchen, or a brave attempt at self-maintenance by ordering clippers from Amazon.