It was time to get my traditional pre-Christmas haircut. The older I get, the quicker it seems to grow, and not always from areas where I am used to having hair growing.

My usual barber is three days away from retirement. In an American movie, that would only mean heartache, but, honestly, how dangerous can cutting hair be? Still, one last go-around seemed appropriate, so I wandered down to her shop for its 9am opening time, an hour before my shift was due to start.

It seems that when you’re three days from retiring from your own gentlemen’s hair reduction business, you’re less concerned about arriving on time. Ten minutes after the shop was due to open, it still had not, and my hair was still growing. I needed a barber, stat. I’ve got a large head, and I can’t have too much hair on it, or my Christmas dinner paper crown won’t fit.

I tried another nearby barber who was due to open at 9am. His shutters were also down. There must have been some sort of barbers’ Christmas party in Liverpool last night, where they swap gossip about men with nits.

The only other option was the Turkish barber down the road. I wasn’t sure about this. I’ve heard stories about singeing, and my earlobes are quite large, even taking into account the size of my enormous head, so if they caught light we could lose half of Allerton Road. On the other hand, I was at risk of looking ridiculous at Christmas dinner. Besides, I’d be the customer in this scenario. If the barber whipped out the flame thrower, I’d firmly, if squeakily, pass on the opportunity to have my ear hairs melted.

I sat in the chair, and told the barber what I wanted – “This, only shorter” – and he set to work. If you’ve never had a Turkish barber attack your head before, it’s less “snip, snip, snip” and more “extreme topiary with a chain saw”.

Before too long, he had shaved enough from my scalp, and I did have indeed “This, only shorter” on my head. Perhaps it was a little shorter than I would normally expect, but I’d rather get my money’s worth.

“Eyebrows? You want eyebrows?” he asked. If that’s not a loaded question, I don’t know what is. I’m not sure what eyebrows are for, other than to show how surprised I am, but I’d rather have them than not.

“Erm, do you mean you’ll trim my eyebrows?” He nodded and I agreed. My eyebrows, after 40-odd years of stasis, mysteriously decided to enter a hippy phase a while back, and I have to keep on top of them. He shaved a millimetre or two off them.

“I like this,” I told my reflection. “This is a good look for you. You look suave, Gary.”

And then the barber asked me, “You want wax?” Did I?! I routinely have gel on my hair, otherwise it sticks up so much that I look as if I’ve been startled by a ghost in a cartoon. Every barber I have had in the past 35 years has asked me if I want wax on my hair, and I always reply in the affirmative. This was the finishing touch. “Yes, please,” I said.

It will forever be a mystery to me how I failed to notice the bubbling vat of pink liquid on the barber’s shelf. It was right in front of me. And yet I don’t think I clocked it properly until the barber dipped two cotton buds in the cauldron, and then shoved the boiling wax UP MY NOSE.

And then, as I sat in the barber’s chair, the wax hardening on the cotton buds stuffed up my nostrils, he started painting my ears with hot pink wax. I had cotton buds in my nose and one hanging from each magenta-painted ear. I did not look suave.

“Ready?” he asked. I was and I was not. I nodded, the cotton buds swinging.

As he pulled them, along with a couple of dozen nasal hairs, out of my nostrils I made a speedy calculation: “Just how loudly can I yelp without lowering myself in the sight of the other men in this shop?” I settled on a strangulated sound which I can only describe as Mike Yarwood saying “Errr” in the voice of the future King Charles III.

As a tear trickled down my manly cheek, he stripped the wax from one ear. It felt like I had placed my ear against a frozen pipe, then ripped it away. It felt worse the second time.

I’ve never considered cotton buds to be threatening before. In fact, I used to scoff when the Gladiators used to fight each other with oversized Johnson & Johnson’s on Saturday-night telly. Now I see the error of my ways.

The annoying thing about no longer having a weekly syndicated column is that when terrible things happen to me I cannot monetise them. It was the only thing that made being me worthwhile.

For example, if the Festive Bake incident had happened to me three years ago, I would have been cock-a-hoop. “Excellent,” I would have thought. “Yes, this might be the very worst thing that could have happened to me at this point in my life, but at least I won’t spend three hours on Wednesday morning alternately looking at a blank screen, a 1pm deadline, and a heart monitor.”

But not everything has a monetary value. Sometimes it is important to tell your own story just to help you process what has happened to you. So this one is pro bono, though never pro-Bono.

Let me start my tale by stating from the off that I am very much not in favour of Covid-19. If anything, it is one of my least favourite coronaviruses. I will do anything I can to prevent the spread of Covid-19, including enduring a small and brief amount of pain on two or three occasions, and wearing a face mask in confined spaces.

If that makes me a hero, then so be it. I know I am special, and I refuse to judge those who feel themselves unable to make that sort of gruelling effort to protect their fellow citizens, whether they are too feeble, or they are philosophically in favour of the promotion of Covid-19.

And yet… How is it that we can synthesise vaccines to mitigate a life-threatening disease in a matter of months, but we cannot produce a face mask that doesn’t steam up my bloody glasses?

I currently have three choices when out and about in the world: 1) be able to see everything, but helpless to prevent any droplets issuing from my person; 2) be able to see nothing more than a metre and a half away from me, but be able to sneeze without causing a riot in Marks & Spencer; or 3) protect passers-by from my evil fluids, but see the world as through a shower screen. The first is glasses on, mask off, the second is glasses off, mask on, and the third is glasses on and mask on. There is no way I can see everything and protect the public at the same time. I have no idea how Spider-Man does it.

All this means that a trip to the shops involves a lot of switching between glasses and mask, with the redundant apparatus being shoved in whichever pocket is available, and if you think that is not an accident waiting to happen, then you have the risk assessment capability of an anti-vaxxer.

Speaking of which, I had just had my booster jab, and was in the two-hour gap between the jab and the time an item I had ordered online was due to be delivered to the shop from which I was to collect it. The internet has turned the whole world into a branch of Argos.

I had time to kill and a few bits of Christmas shopping to snatch, so I began a long chain of switching between glasses and mask, until, during a glasses phase, I saw a poster in Greggs’ window for the Festive Bake. The Festive Bake is, for me, a more powerful sign of the imminent coming of Christmas than door No.1 on the Advent calendar or the arrival of a new Covid variant.

If you have never had a Festive Bake, imagine a small pillow made of puff pastry, filled with white sauce, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and the smallest possible amount of chicken – probably – and bacon that could prevent the bake from being technically vegetarian. Yes, it sounds dreadful, but it is somehow not, and I look forward to my first bite every year.

I pulled on my mask, and burst into the shop. “GIVE ME THE BIGGEST FESTIVE BAKE YOU HAVE! MAKE MY CHRISTMAS HAPPEN NOW!” I yelled. I did not really. It would have been pointless. All Festive Bakes are exactly the same size, like Kit-Kats or AA batteries. “A Festive Bake, please,” I mumbled, through my mask.

“They’re not very warm,” the Greggswoman told me. As if I cared. I’ve worn a mask on the bus for the past 21 months; a lukewarm pasty is nothing to me.

I bought the bake, and a packet of mince pies – Greggs’ mince pies are the best, without qualification – and tore out of the shop. I pulled the mask from my face and bit into my inaugural Festive Bake. It was lukewarm. “At least I won’t have to worry about the steam misting up my glasses,” I thought.

“Hang on, where are my glasses?” I patted down my pockets. I checked all my pockets. I repeated the process three times. I found pockets I hadn’t used since plastic £5 notes were introduced. I found pockets I didn’t know I had. The glasses were in none of them.

Where was the last place I had them, I wondered? My face, obviously. They weren’t there.

And so I found myself wandering up and down a busy shopping street, miserably scanning the pavement for a pair of glasses without the aid of a pair of glasses, while absent-mindedly gnawing on a Festive Bake. I don’t remember a bite.

After half an hour I realised that I would never find them. A magpie must have taken them. Or maybe a human person? Who might have handed them to a shop assistant…? No, they couldn’t be…?

I re-entered Greggs. “I don’t suppose anybody has handed in a pair of glasses…?”

The Greggswoman handed me my glasses. “You left them on the counter. I tried to run after you, but I couldn’t pick you out.”

Of course she couldn’t. I was wearing a mask.

I went to Röski, and, when the waitress poured gravy into my sherry, I understood why the restaurant’s name contains a shocked-face emoji.

Röski is Liverpool’s latest attempt to bag a Michelin star. On the surface, there’s no reason why the city needs one – Manchester hasn’t got one and you can’t move for gourmet Yorkshire pudding joints and Thai burger places there – but, on the other hand, Manchester hasn’t got one.

So MasterChef: The Professionals winner Anton Piotrowski has installed himself inside the former and much-loved Puschka on Rodney Street, changing the warm interior into a sort of duck-egg minimalism, and switching on his “Behold! I am very clever” beam to attract the right sort of attention.

This is fair enough, he is very clever, and we’ll get to that, don’t you worry. But the reason Liverpool has failed to trouble the Michelin guide is not so much about food as it is about service. It’s the Scouse Waiter Problem.

The thing about service in a Liverpool restaurant is that it’s great. It’s really friendly. And that’s the trouble. Scouse waiting staff tend to treat you like you’re their friend. I’ve even been called “mate” a few times, despite my studiedly stand-offish demeanour. I mean, how dare they? How bloody dare they?

Basically, there’s an informality about the proceedings, bordering on laissez-faire, and if there’s one thing the Michelin inspectors are not hoping to encounter, it’s that.

Röski is very different. The front of house staff – led by Piotrowski’s partner, Rose – treat you like guests. They’re not going to ask you to be their Facebook friend. These are professionals. There’s warmth, obviously, but they know why we’re there and we know why they’re there. They noticed our table was wobbly about four seconds after we did, and scurried over with a wedge three seconds after that, which is showing off, quite frankly.

Why are we there? Well, it’s not for the playlist, which was a mix of Motown and Stax that Saturday night, familiar as a hug from an auntie. It’s the food. It’s always the food.

The normal menu is suspended on Fridays and Saturdays, replaced by a tasting menu, which begins with incomer Piotrowski’s tribute to a scouse chippy tea. A cheesy chip is triple-cooked and glazed with Lincolnshire Poacher, and dribbled with a Wagyu gravy. Served on a katsu curry sauce slick is a breadcrumbed Wagyu beef nugget. Wagyu beef features heavily on the menu. I can only assume Piotrowski made a mistake on the order and put an extra zero on the end. And then there’s a Bovril butter to be spread on sourdough from Baltic Bakehouse.

Oh, yes, the Wagyu gravy. Glasses of fino sherry are served “at room temperature” with the meal. “We’re going to pour some gravy into your sherry,” the waitress tells us. “You’re bloody not,” my head says. “OK,” my mouth says. A drop of gravy drops into the glass, and the waitress swirls it round, turning the perfectly good sherry into a sort of 50s milky coffee.

Fair enough, Piotrowski knows best. The gravy brings out that umami taste that makes a good sherry, and the sherry somehow boosts the beefiness of the gravy.

He’s built up enough trust now. Bring it on, we think. He does.

Next up are gin and tonic crab, a clean-tasting crab mayonnaise with cucumber and papaya, and, in a frothy burnt butter sauce, a scallop which could be eaten with a spoon.

Asparagus with salad cream, and langoustine with wasabi were well executed, but only memorable because I pinched a copy of the menu.

“What Came First?” gets us back on track. A riff on a chicken and mushroom pie, it’s a powerfully-flavoured chicken velouté , covering wild mushrooms, served in an egg shell, and accompanied by a pile of bay leaves covered in dry ice, which atomises the herb, turning it into a perfume.

The Wagyu beef returns, because of course it does, in the form of a tartare served with burger mayonnaise – imagine McDonald’s special sauce with a touch more poke – and sliced gherkins. He’s having a laugh, now, is Piotrowski, gold put to the use of paving stones, and still not losing its lustre. Along with the tartare is a hoi sin duck, crispy on the outside, and tenderly pink inside.

And then we come to the red cabbage bolognaise. It’s a pile of what looks like a bog-standard ragu, served on top of a stone, and dusted with some Parmigiano Reggiano. And it really does taste like mamma used to make, specifically my mamma.

But there is no meat. Somehow, Piotrowski makes red cabbage and tomato taste like beef. Wagyu beef, probably.

It is as brilliant as it is pointless. If you’re going to show off how good your meatless ragu is, it’s got to be the the best ragu I’ve ever had. Honestly, Anton, I could give you my mum’s recipe (“Ingredients: mince, jar of Dolmio…”) and save you hours in the kitchen.

A squab pigeon comes next, on a wild garlic sauce. It’s a rosy breast, and a beautifully rendered leg. There’s not much meat on the leg, obviously – you’ve seen pigeons – but there’s a Chinese proverb which says “The closer the bone, the sweeter the meat” and you can’t knock the Chinese. Not after the Huawei contract.

Puddings start with “1980s”, Red Leicester attached by a cocktail stick to compressed pineapple with a Red Leicester custard, and end with “pina colada”, a coconut cream with pineapple sorbet. In between is a bit of chocolate crème fraîche nonsense with shards of cep-flavoured caramel. It’s magical.

There’s a decent short wine flight, by the way, including a grapefruity Chenin Blanc from Devon, of all places. I think it was a Chenin Blanc, I wasn’t paying attention at that point. I was too busy making sure the waitress wasn’t going to pour gravy into my glass.

I don’t know if Röski is going to break Liverpool’s Michelin duck, but if it does I won’t be wearing a shocked face.

Röski, 16 Rodney Street, Liverpool, L1 2TE. 0151 708 8698. roskirestaurant.com. Open Tuesday-Saturday. Tasting menu only on Friday and Saturday. Tasting menu: £75. Short wine flight: £40. Premier wine flight: £65.

LAST summer, after years of getting the bus, I decided I would buy a 2007 Volkswagen Eos. The intersection of the Venn diagram of people who understand the implications of that statement and those who are keen opponents of Brexit is quite small. In fact, hello, Jeremy Clarkson. Nice jeans.

For those of you who are unaware, a VW Eos is a hard top convertible car, which was discontinued a few years ago for reasons which will become clear.

I had always wanted a hard top convertible because owning one is like owning a Transformer. All one has to do to put the roof down or bring it back up again is press a button, and then 17 individual motors whirr and fold or unfold the several components into a little package which is deposited in the boot. Can you think of anything more cool than that? No, you cannot.

But people said to me when I was considering my purchase, “Gary, you are an idiot. It’s older than your youngest child, and she goes to Big Big School now. You’re counting on 17 individual motors to work? You don’t even have T-shirts that old and T-shirts don’t have moving parts.

“You will regret this, you total nincompoop. Buy a normal car, which will get you from A to B, and which will not cover you with water every time it rains and you brake suddenly.”

I pooh-poohed all of them. They were just being massive spoilsports.

I marched to the second-hand motors dealer and spent an amount of money I will never see again on this car. There’s a reason why they call the people who sell cars “dealers”, isn’t there? You don’t call a greengrocer a “melon dealer” or a butcher a “mince dealer”. But we do refer to arms dealers. And drug dealers.

And, for the first couple of months, all was more or less well. This is because I bought a convertible car in July. When the rainy season came, all was more or less unwell. The seals between the individual parts of the roof which keep out the rain did not.

I went on to the internet to try to find out why this was happening, as if I did not know why it was happening. Even so, there was an expensive oil I could buy which would lubricate the seals. And so, every few weeks, I would lubricate the seals, a job not even a zookeeper has to do.

It did nothing to help, and so, every time it rained for more than 38 seconds, water would fill a channel, waiting for the moment that I would brake, at which point a tide would empty over my trousers, and run down my seat, gathering in a pool in which I would sit.

And then I lost my job. Well, “lost” is a bit too much. What happened is that I intentionally mislaid my job in exchange for some money. But it meant that I had enough cash to have the seals replaced, just as soon as I got round to it…

It appears that I have a tremendous tolerance for mild liquid inconvenience. Besides, I discovered that if I took the roof down for a moment, the water would drain away. I got used to this solution.

So, after a morning of heavy rain, I went to my car and took down the roof. And when I put it back up, one of the 17 motors gave up the ghost. The sun roof refused to close, and the rain started again.

I drove six miles to my nearest VW dealership as the rain came down and asked them to please make brum brum good again. They would definitely be able to fix it. But they couldn’t do it for another six days. Luckily, the motor came back online, and I was able to close the sun roof.

I went back six days later. A mechanic who specialises in the Eos and its ways took a look at it. “Yeah,” he said. “We need to replace this seal.”

“Thought so,” I said, smugly.

“Thing is, if we replace that seal, we have to replace this one as well,” he continued. “Basically, we have to replace all the seals.”

“Oh,” I said, less smugly. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Also, they don’t make the seals anymore, so we’ll have to source them from somewhere.”

I did not like the sound of this. “H-how much do you think it would cost?”

The mechanic quoted me a figure that was roughly equal to the amount for which I had bought the car eight months before.

“We could do the work,” he said. “But it’s not worth the bother.”

I don’t go out to work anymore. I don’t really need a car, I thought. I’ll just test the promise made by webuyanycar.com to destruction.

I was given a quote which was nowhere near half the amount I paid for the car, but was enough to let me walk away with some dignity, and I made an appointment to take it in.

But it had been raining on the morning of the appointment. I went to my car to take it on our last drive. And, before I thought about it, I pressed the button to lower the roof and drain the channel. And when I pressed it again the sun roof refused to close.

So I drove in the rain to see the webuyanycar.com man. He noted the condition of the sun roof, and reduced the offer by three-quarters.

I walked away with a tiny fraction of the cash I had splurged on the car, and something even more horrible occurred to me – I had just experienced a Brexit metaphor.

I was fine taking the bus everywhere before. It wasn’t perfect, but at least I didn’t have to insure my bus, or pay road tax.

And when I decided I wanted the independence of a car, I didn’t go for something sensible, I went for a teenage boy’s ideal car.

And when my friends and family told me of the pitfalls of convertibles, I dismissed their warnings as Project Fear. They were talking down unnecessarily complicated midlife crises.

And then, when things went wrong, I blithely kept calm and carried on. There was nothing structurally wrong with it, after all. It still got me from A to B. All it needed was a bit of grease on the seals. And so what if I had to sit in a pool of water? Ducks do that all the time and they’re happy enough.

And, when I finally faced reality, having chucked away a load of money, the car was so utterly fucked that I walked away with little compensation and even less dignity.

And the German automotive industry failed to come to my rescue, because it turned out they could very easily do without my business.

SO, a few weeks ago, I released the third volume of my columns, Massaging A Ghost. You’ve probably forgotten that I used to write a column. I rarely mentioned it.

It is totally still available from Amazon, by the way, if you want it. It’s in paperback and on Kindle because that’s what people like and I am a people pleaser. In theory. Technically, I am what they call an aspiring people pleaser.

Anyway, these columns went up to the beginning of 2016. But my column finished at the beginning of 2019. That means there were three years of columns still uncompiled. I don’t know about you, but I reckon that state of affairs simply cannot stand.

So I am delighted to present to you, the largely indifferent public, the fourth volume of my columns, Accidental Gravy.

Just like its predecessor, it is available in paperback (£7.99) and on Kindle (£3.99). “Why is it so much more expensive in paperback, Gary?” I hear you ask.

“Well,” I reply, “printing things costs money, and putting things online costs less money, and that’s basically why they don’t print The Independent any more.”

Anyway, buy it. I don’t mind which format you use. It’s none of my business.

IF anything epitomises my ability to self-sabotage, it is my love of a nice cup of tea.

First, you have to bear in mind that only about one in six cups of tea could possibly be called nice, because people’s taste in tea, far more than in coffee, is a subjective thing.

This is why I am not in the tea round in the office. I would find it an administrative nightmare if I were making the tea, and intolerable if I were receiving the tea.

There are charts, for instance, of ideal tea colour, which are fine as far as they go. But they don’t take into account the amount of milk that people like. You could ask for a 4B on the Tea Colour Scale, but that could be stronger in the brewing stage and more lavish in the milk addition stage than you like, yet still be the correct colour.

And every tea bag is different. Every kettle of water is different. Sometimes they react in subtle ways to each other, meaning you can have a transcendent cuppa, or you can have something that tastes like Katie Hopkins sounds.

The point is that I am drinking five cups of average-to-poor tea for every one satisfying cuppa, even if I am making it myself. If tea were a football manager it would be sacked before Christmas.

Second, tea makes me look like a loser when I am attempting to look like a sophisticated man about town.

You see, the sophisticated way to finish off a meal is a coffee. I have no idea how we came to decide that. Presumably somebody thought the best way to finish off a beautifully cooked, balanced, and seasoned meal would be to destroy the taste buds with the bitterest substance known to man.

Just because I refuse to abandon tea for this upstart, waiters give me that look when I ask for tea, the international symbol for “Technically, the customer is always right – I’ve been on a course – but I’m looking at you now and if I owned this joint, not only would you be barred, but I would see to it that no restaurant in this town would admit you in future. And I would set fire to your trousers.”

So they bring me a small pot of tepid tea, a jug with too much milk, and no biscuit, even though my companion, who is unaccountably drinking coffee like a traitor, gets one. And I drink it, because it’s one of the five-in-six and increases my chances of getting a good one next time.

Third, I work a hilariously stupid shift, from 1.30-10pm. It means I usually get home just before 11pm. In order to get enough time in the morning to do something practical, or merely enjoy the moments that I am not at work, I should really go to sleep around midnight.

But what I actually do is walk through my front door, and put the kettle on. Because I am programmed to wind down by having a cup of tea. I am northern. It is what we do.

And when I get to bed, just before midnight, that is the moment when the caffeine in the tea kicks in, along with all my brain’s synapses. A potentially sleepy person is transformed into Dynamo, The World’s Widest Awake Man.

This is when I wonder things like which brave soul first decided that you could eat blue cheese, why they invented parachutes before they invented aeroplanes, and if Top Cat would now live in a wheely bin.

It means I never get to sleep before 1.30am, which is why I’m tired all the time. Either the tea or the job has to go.

And it’s not going to be the tea, I’m afraid.

I have been writing this weekly column in some form since 2009, but all mediocre things must come to an end. I’d like to thank the people who have made it possible – especially Charles and Eddie, MD and Figgis, and Rihanna and the estate of the late Sir David Frost. And bus drivers.

I’d like to thank the people who supported my column, and those who are no longer with us, especially my mum, and my good friends Suzi Moore, and, heartbreakingly recently, Simon Ricketts.

And finally I’d like to thank all my readers, even the ones who write to me about Brexit. Please buy my books. I have a tea habit to maintain.