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THE audience on BBC Radio Scotland's Off The Ball programme last Saturday was asked to reveal what they were most looking forward to doing, once the coronavirus crisis passes.

I didn’t catch any of the answers, I'm afraid, although I have a suspicion that ‘going to the pub for a pint’ and, naturally, ‘going back to the football’ may have been high on the list.

I’m wholly on board with both, by the way. But my answer will involve neither football, nor beer.

For the moment we are told that we can do things the way we used to do them until a few short weeks ago, my top priority will be going to the barber and asking for the sort of crew cut that would make a soldier in the US Marine Corps look suspiciously bohemian.

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I used to suffer from big hair, you see. That seems to be the style among teenage boys these days, so the look I had 25 years ago might well see me cut quite a dash if I were aged 15 now.

But despite all my best efforts to destroy the evidence, there are still one or two pictures, buried deep in a family album somewhere, which were taken of me in the mid-1990s and which make me cringe even to this day.

Ever since those traumatic times, I’ve never allowed more than four weeks to pass between trips to the barber, so the prospect of having to wait weeks, if not months, longer than that is, as you can probably imagine, making me more than a little anxious.

On the subject of haircuts, Nicola Sturgeon posted a photo on social media last weekend, showing her holding a set of fearsome-looking hair clippers at the back of her husband Peter Murrell’s head, next to the caption #PrayForPeter.

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I’m assuming all went reasonably well, as I’ve heard no word of blood gushing on to the Bute House carpet in the days that followed.

But while Mrs B is supremely talented at many things, not least organising of pretty much every aspect of my life, despite almost 13 years of happy marriage I don't think I'm quite ready to let her wield sharp objects next to my head.

For now, I’ll just have to accept that for a while yet, the top of my head may well make children point and laugh when I go out for my once-a-day government-approved exercise.

Of course, there's always the chance that the stresses and strains of our current predicament might mean most of my hair will have fallen out before I get a chance to go to the barber. And despite the psychological scars left by the big hair of my teenage years, that, I'm afraid, is not all that much of a consolation...

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