How Erik the Red Gave Me a Haircut: Bad Hair Days

Anne Marble
4 min readOct 15, 2022

Our childhoods are full of bad hair days. Cheap trimmers. Awful haircuts. Bubblegum. And Erik the Red once cut my hair.

A woodcut illustration showing Erik the Red in armor.
A Woodcut Depicting Erik the Red. (Not the Actual Barber!) (Source: Wikimedia Commons; public domain.)

The Hair Clipper From Heck?

Hair clippers might remind you of the poor Henry Huggins getting an awful haircut in one of Beverley Cleary’s Henry Huggins books: Henry And Ribsy.

Just like Henry Huggins’ parents, my folks bought a hair clipper to save money. But, so the story goes, the blades got dull, and Dad kept insisting it was fine. Because he could fix it.

Luckily, my brothers made enough noise (literally!), and the hair clipper finally disappeared. Maybe my mother secretly put it in the trash and made sure she buried it under the coffee grounds. My father later admitted he should have thrown that monstrous thing away long before.

A Few of My Bad Hair Days

My hairy experiences weren’t quite that bad.

Sure, I’m told that one time, my mother brought me to a hairdresser, and I cried and cried because that evil woman dared to cut my hair.

Another time, I went to sleep chewing some bubblegum (I must have smuggled in the contraband). Naturally, it ended up in my hair and my PJs. Mum tried putting the PJs into the freezer to make the bubblegum easier to take it off…

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Anne Marble
Anne Marble

Written by Anne Marble

I’m a writer and a copy editor with experience in editing science and engineering articles. Click Lists to find my most popular articles. And hidden gems.