John Gibson: Let’s cut to Charlie and those chops

By John Gibson
Published on 07/08/2012 12:00

Chop chop, Charlie! We were talking chops, the kind Bradley Wiggins sports, and wondering whether our Tour de France wonder man, who cultivates them down below his ears, will make them fashionable among Edinburgh’s menfolk.

Said Charlie Miller, the capital’s celebrated barber, never one for splitting hairs: “Let’s not get too excited about Bradley. The answer is no. But it’s early days. If Brad keeps turning up on television, chops might grow on some of our more impressionable customers.

“In the Sixties there were a lot of chops around. I knew them as sideburns or sidelappers. They’re not exactly beautiful but they are very masculine.

“It was, don’t forget, Robert Burns who brought sideburns into out vocabulary. By the way, I mastered in men’s hairdressing, a fact I dredge up now and again because women predominate among Millers clientele.”

In the wake of Mr Miller’s bytheway, here’s an incidentally. Don’t you agree that if they propped a cloth cap on Bradley Wiggins’ head he’d make a spitting image of Harry H. Corbett, son of Steptoe?

Horse sense

ZAra Phillips talking on the hoof in conversation with her mother, the Olympics in mind: “I listen, but anybody would with the experience she has with horses.’’

And Sean Connery invariably listened to the guy driving the carthorse on their milk round.

Afterwords . .

. . . bulky and inclined to be sulky, Robbie Coltrane on what a Scotsman has under his kilt: ‘‘A couple of McDonald’s quarter-pounders, I imagine.”