Someone's Snipped Off the Man Bun I Was Rocking

Someone has snipped off my man bun. I can’t be sure who it was, as it was on the back of my head, and my eyes are in front. My best guess is that it was last month, when I took the bus and train into London proper just to get out from under my computer for a couple of hours and realised I might enjoy a bit of heckling on Hyde Park’s Speakers Corner, where, because it’s good for tourism, lunatics are encouraged to get up on soapboxes or little portable ladders and bellow their convictions at passers-by. As I approached, an earnest young iman was informing a small crowd about what Allah expected of them, and a rather larger crowd gaping in wonder at a North American-sounding guy in a Stetson hat, ornate cowboy boots, and 120-percent-polyester-looking trousers with Jesus Is Savior (spelled Americanly)  down the sides of the legs. It was his view that we all needed to repent, and to embrace the alleged deity referenced on his trouser legs.

Every time he paused for breath, a big lumpy Brit in the crowd would turn and say something snide to his fellow sinners, looking at them beseechingly, apparently hoping that someone would beam at him delightedly, or even exult, “What a very wry chap you are!” Being Brits, though, they all pretended not to notice him, which had the effect of making him more desperate. Which, in turn, made them amp up their obliviousness. My smirking obligingly at one of his quips didn’t seem to help. At one point, it looked as though he might burst into tears of frustration.

As Cowboy Preacher paused for breath, I decided to get in on the fun and shouted, “He’s American! You can’t trust these people!” I hoped everyone might enjoy the irony of my having made this declaration in my standard American accent, but the British don’t really do irony, and I got only crickets. I was duly embarrassed. The big Brit heckler sneered at me as though to say, “Thought you’d amuse them more than I, you presumptuous Yank twat?”, though he almost certainly would said “more than me”, the Brits being no better with pronouns than with irony, as witness a scene in the first season of The Crown in which some hifalutin Oxbridge academic hired to tutor Princess Elizabeth makes that same grammatical error. “Bloody hell,” I thought to myself Britishly. “Did no one — not the writer, the director, one of his sherpas, the cinematographer, the actors, the best boy, the grip, or anyone in the catering truck — recognise that a hifalutin Oxbridge academic would have said I?”

Shut up, thought Dame Zelda, beside me.

My man bun, as do my circulation-threateningly tight skinny jeans, made me feel so hip, so with-it, so switched on. I am proud to say that I came up with the idea of it before having glimpsed Trendspotter.com’s “15 Ways to Rock a Man Bun Hairstyle”. My man bun was an expression of my inextinguishable rebelliousness, but it was not I, to use the proper pronoun. I am so much more than my hairstyle or clothing. I am not Sampson, and snipping off my man bum makes me no less virile, no less inexorable. I shall grow another, and maybe even a beard of the sort that has become so fashionable among other rebellious studs.

I cannot help but wonder if sumo wrestlers roar with laughter when they see skinny white British, American, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealish hipsters with top knots, but must allow nothing to come between me and my destiny. Thank you, as ever, for your support.