Okay, it really didn’t cost that much. But I’m used to going to the budget places where you spend more time punching in your EFTPOS pin number than you do in the chair getting your hair cut – the franchise salons where the hairdressers are sometimes one blade short of a scissors. (Like Jonno, who admitted he got fired from his last job because he spit chewing gum into a customer’s hair.)

Not that my mother would have approved of my cheap haircuts, if she knew. I grew up in the American South where going to the beauty parlor was like going to church. You went once a week and if you were lucky had a religious experience. Mom went to Laverne for years and years. Laverne and Alice had a shop across the road from the drug store. They wore white uniforms and crepe-soled shoes. Every once in awhile Alice disappeared through the swinging doors at the back and returned with metal bowls filled with a mysterious Coca-cola coloured goo that gave off a faint hazardous waste-tinged odour. I can’t remember what the goo was used for; perhaps it was only hair dye, but I liked to imagine that Alice was a mad scientist seeking a cure for dandruff.

The best time was when I was eight and Laverne gave me a hair-do just like my mother’s. She washed and set it, then teased it into a beehive, finishing off by firing her twin bottles of hairspray at my head like a gunslinger. See a hair out of place? Shoot to kill. Later I rode my bike around the neighbourhood. Bugs got stuck in my hair.

My girlfriend doesn’t approve of my predilection for cheap haircuts either. She’s had the same hairdresser for twenty-eight years. They’re planning a commitment ceremony. Although she never said anything, I could read her mind, and it was saying unkind things to my shaggy hair. So in the interest of relationship harmony, I made an appointment at ‘The Salon’. Actually, I jumped off the bus, rushed in and asked if they had a cancellation. The Receptionist told me to come back in half an hour.

When I returned, she sat me down to explain how lucky I was to get an appointment. In a low murmur she impressed upon me how their stylists were always booked weeks in advance. Maybe she was afraid I’d start a trend; the denizens of Grey Lynn would mistake them for a walk-in $10 haircut bar and freak out the Remuera matrons who trekked down the motorway for their services.

The Receptionist also wanted to make sure I knew just how much this haircut was going to set me back. Something about my ratty blue trainers, mismatched socks, and jeans with pink ink spilled on the left knee failed to inspire confidence that my wallet could handle the load. If I’d had any spine, I would have fled. But an apparition appeared in the mirror – it could have been Alice holding a metal bowl – beckoning me to the chair.

I must admit I was curious about what kind of a haircut I’d get for this amount of dosh. How would the experience be fundamentally different from the ones where I sat squashed in a plastic chair between eleven year-old goths playing video games and McDonald’s shiftworkers complaining about hat hair while awaiting my turn with Buffy the Split-end Slayer?

Curiousity didn’t stop me, however, from doing the math in my head: I could have bought health insurance with this money. Or a cell phone. How many African villages could have been saved from famine? How much interest would I have earned if I put the money in a superannuation fund? How much will the cat food cost that I’ll be eating when I’m 80 and broke?

The chair The Stylist sat me in for my shampoo reclined on its own. The basin was padded, so it didn’t have the usual rolling-pin-grinding-the-back-of-your-skull-to-pulp feel. “Yes,” The Stylist purred, “it’s very important to us that you’re comfortable.”

Oh, didn’t the moral dilemma self talk start then? How far down the slippery slope have I fallen? What’s next, buying frocks from Trelise Cooper? What if I get addicted to expensive haircuts? Everybody knows they only last 34 minutes and then you’re back needing another one . . . and another. Is this what we fought for, is this what feminism is all about . . . the freedom to give our money to institutions that make women slaves to image in order to please men?

The Stylist offered me the choice of water, coffee, or wine. I chose water, which was Laverne’s fault. She and Alice quit the beauty parlor business, went upscale and opened a women’s clothing store. One day Laverne offered Granny a glass of sherry while she waited to try on shoes. Granny spilled it all down her bosom. She tried to laugh it off, but I was embarrassed. (Mom worried about Granny’s drinking anyway. When she went out on dates, Mom insisted on driving her and her gentlemen friends.) I guess from Granny’s experience I developed a fear of drinking in the presence of hairdressers. You couldn’t say what it might lead to.

The chatter in my head started up again as The Stylist gently razored through my locks: When in history did haircuts get outsourced from the home to these Temples of Fru-Fru? Why wouldn’t it be socially acceptable for me to go home and take the garden shears to my head?

In my mind’s eye I envisaged a different self. One covered in fleas treating the sick and malnourished in a health clinic in Bhopal. I pause between administering vaccinations for dread diseases and remember the frivolous days when I used to get $100,000 haircuts on the cusp of Ponsonby. I sneer; that other me isn’t worth a second’s more consideration.

But I’m not in Bhopal, am I? I’m in Auckland where run-of-the mill homes cost a million-two, Range Rovers ferry tots to kindy, and baristas charge $3.50 for fifty cents worth of coffee. Are we all crazy? Are we? Or am I just so out of touch I should slap myself and get over it?

Yesterday’s newspaper said the world’s going to run out of water in twenty years. When that happens, will it matter how much I spent on a haircut in 2006? I don’t know. But the good news is, I woke up this morning and hated my new ‘do. It’s kind of the rat’s-nest-meets-mud-wrestler look. Definitely not me. So maybe this means the problem will solve itself. I can peel my conscience off the rack and go back to the $10 hair cut bar in peace.

Just don’t mention it to my girlfriend.