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I am officially 2 feet of hair lighter today. Reaction has been mixed to say the least. So far my favourite comments are "well, it's not as awful as it could have been", "you look middle aged", "you look like someone's dad", "you look like Don Johnson" (from a bald man) and "you look much younger"(from my new best friend). So either I previously looked 50 and now look a youthful middle-age, or people have hugely different views of follicular age determination.

Actually, that's a lie. My favourite comment so far is "you've had your hair cut!". Which is odd, because I thought that I sat in a chair for an hour last night while toucans massaged my skull. £34 for a soothing treatment from exotic birds seemed like a bargain.

My official reason for having it done is that long hair is a fucking pain in the arse when diving. Getting a hood on takes longer, sorting it out afterwards requires power-brushing that would skin a rhino. But it's also nice to look at it as a break from the past. My flowing girly locks have been with me through school, university, reenactment and work. It has seen my clothes change from snow combats and ripped t-shirt to velvet shirts and new rocks, to a walking marks and spencers advert. It bore witness to the rise and collapse of the dot-com bubble and the stratification of the IT industry into really good ideas that cost an awful lot of money, and really bad ideas that seem to cost more. My hair had out-survived the Yangtze river dolphin. My wife, like a chinese hair-biologist will mourn; my mane wistfully remembered in slowly flicked pictures damp from salty tears. I hope that's where the similarity ends. My hair is in a bag in a drawer somewhere in the house. The removal men are going to be pretty pissed off it they have to transfer 200 kilos of soggy decaying freshwater mammal down to Plymouth.

I'm just glad that my initial fear of my hair being the source of my sarcasm have failed to materialize. With 14 days left in this industry followed by 3-7 years of being surrounded by 18 year olds giggling into their mobile phones whilst proclaiming "WHY MUST YOU JUDGE ME??!", I'm going to need all the vitriol I can muster.