I have to get my hair cut tomorrow. There's not much there, but what is, needs attention.

There's no opportunity for anything fancy, it's a trim on the sides then run the razor over the blasted heath that is the crown of my head. It's bleak up there. The occasional hair like very thin and solitary beanstalks, as venerable and remote from each other as Easter Island statues. No luxurious garden, no thicket, no hedgerow, dense and tangled, but what you have you hold, or at least tidy up to make presentable.

So in the morning, I'll be sitting waiting for my turn in Reno's chair - he's the local barber who I've been going to for several years. There'll be Classic FM playing, freebie newspapers spread around to flick through as I wait, and the low hum of the clippers or the steely snip of the scissors. Then, it'll be the snap of a fresh towel and I'll be summoned to sit in that chair.

All of the barbers I've ever been to, and there have been many - Italian, Greek Cypriot, Turkish, British, American from time to time, have been effortless conversationalists. Staring at the rear of heads day in day out and with what must be the very disorientating effect of seeing another's face in the mirror looking back at you, well that's going to do something to you, so why not talk.

The stalwart topics of a Barbershop conversation are in no order of precedence, nor I would anticipate to no one's particular surprise are: Football (local / national teams inability to find the back of the net, poor management, gallivanting overpaid stars); women (can never be understood, the pain and the pleasure, alone or together, the utter mystery of them); cars (can't afford them, "best car I ever had and why don't they make them like that still?"). Expect to find that Holy Trinity in just about any UK (or I imagine worldwide) barbers, they come with the fittings. Not so Reno. He is a little different.

In my time spent in that swivel chair, and with scissors flying over me cutting arabesques in the air, we've talked about: South American politics; the origin of Orthodox Christianity and the split with Rome; travelling within SE Asia; meteorology (no, not weather as in it's pretty warm / cold today, I mean the science of weather), and I'm betting my last pound sterling that at some point tomorrow he'll be talking learnedly about the harum-scarums of the past week in the financial markets.

Does this kind of conversation, actually dialectics, go on in any other male barbershop? What about ladies hairdressers?