No one expects to go to Russia and get the best haircut in the world. Which is why I was absolutely astounded to find St Petersburg's equivalent of Vidal Sassoon on Vladimirskaya Ulitsa, a stone's throw from Nevsky Prospect.
I must admit, I had let my hair get quite out of hand, to the point -- excuse the cliche -- where I couldn't do a thing with it, simply because I dreaded the thought of a Soviet style short, back and sides.
I needn't have feared. Here, virtually on my doorstep, was a Western style salon. So why go to Paris and pay a fortune when Paris, or something resembling it, can come to you for around 60,000 roubles.
Sweeping in from the wet and dirty street, I found myself in plush, marbled and mirrored surroundings. Two beefy security guards muttered "good day" to me in German and looked taken aback when answered back in Russian. I was then escorted to a waiting chair where I would spend the next two hours being pampered and molly coddled like a prize poodle by attentive members of staff.
The hairdresser, who I can confidently say was the absolute end, was a 26-year-year-old Siberian man who had graduated "many years ago" from Dom Modi's hairstyling school. I asked if he had always wanted to be a hairdresser or was it by chance he found his profession? It had, he said, always been his dream.
In Soviet times hairdressing of this nature was the women's realm and the archetypal Russian male would consider a man taking such a profession as sissy or effeminate. Not so today.
This hairdresser explained how he joined the Red Army for his obligatory two years service where he cut the hair of both colleagues and officers in the Far East. He is one of the few Russians I have spoken to who actually enjoyed his national service!
He remarked during the course of our conversation how he would like to travel abroad to France or England to see how the trade was conducted there, but sadly reflected that the cost of travel was so prohibitive for most Russians he thought it unlikely that his hopes would become a reality.
What amazed me about this hairdresser was that here he was, faced with a client almost as bald as boiled egg, and in two miraculous hours, which did more for me than a capsule of Prozac, transformed me into something resembling fashionable.
My hair, or rather lack of it, was washed twice using shampoo and conditioner and then followed several distinct stages to my hair cut, starting with a trim on top, layering on the sides and then the electric razor to tidy up.
What could have been done, and done badly in ten minutes, was made into an art form. Time cased to exist, I forgot about the rain, shakeups at the office and the trials of life and left floating on air. The transformation was complete.