Everything good he owns came with instructions.

Nobody apologises for maintenance

The shoes were resoled in March and the watch was serviced in June. The suits go out and come back pressed. None of that has ever needed defending, at a dinner or anywhere else, because none of it is about how he looks. It is about what happens to good material that nobody looks after.

His barber belongs to that list too, and is the best thing on it. Every three weeks a man who has cut his hair for years makes a decision he trusts, and he is right to trust it. That arrangement works. Nothing here is an argument for changing it.

What a barber is paid to do is cut hair. Nobody has ever been paid to look after the skin it comes out of.

That is the line with nothing written beside it.

The card nobody wrote

Every interval he keeps was written by whoever made the thing. The mill wrote the collar label. The manufacturer wrote the book in the glovebox. The workshop that assembled the movement decided what five years does to a mainspring and printed it on a card, and a man who has never opened the back of a watch in his life follows that card exactly.

Nothing manufactured his scalp. There was no mill and no workshop, so there was nobody whose job it was to write the card, and an interval nobody writes is an interval nobody keeps. That is the whole of it. Not neglect, not vanity, not a decision he made and got wrong. A blank line, in the one place where every other line was filled in for him by somebody who made the object.

So here is what belongs on it.

What goes on that line

Take the material first, because it is the half a man cannot improvise. Jojoba is a wax ester rather than a fat, which makes it the closest thing in the bottle to what the skin already puts out, so the blend goes in instead of sitting on top of it. Castor and batana are the heavy ones and they stay for hours. Coconut goes into the fibre itself and slows the protein it loses. Olive and avocado are the softening pair. Rosemary and peppermint sit eighth and ninth on the label, which is where the smallest quantities are, and the peppermint is the cool feeling on application. The vitamin E has one job and it happens inside the bottle: it keeps the other eight from turning.

The second line means what it says. It goes on the skin under the hair and not through the lengths, which is why the dose is a dropperful and not a handful, and why it is done on wet hair after a shower.

The third line is the one that has never existed. Ninety seconds is not a figure of speech, it is how long the massage takes to be worth doing, and three to five times a week is what the people who make it put on the sheet.

Those ninety seconds are free. He can do them tonight with nothing in his hands, and it will not be maintenance, in the same way that winding a watch is not a service and a dry cloth is not conditioning leather. Every schedule he already keeps names a material as well as an interval. This one is built the same way.

The material is the half he has to buy.

Golden Oil is the material

A scalp oil, in a thirty millilitre glass bottle with a dropper. Eight botanical oils and a vitamin E, all nine named on the label in descending order of how much of each is in there, so the largest is the first word he reads. Made and shipped in the United States. It is not a shampoo and it does not replace one. It goes on the skin under the hair, on the days the card says.

The other half of any maintenance card is who keeps the date, and a bottle standing on a shelf has never done that for anybody, this one included. So it is worth saying plainly how it is handled rather than leaving it implied. On a subscription the refill arrives on a frequency he sets and the sixth bottle is free, and one person is assigned to the account: he writes to the support address on his order, they recognise the account, and that person takes his case rather than answering about the product in general.

Why the last one stopped

There is a cupboard in that bathroom with two or three of these in it, used twice and never again. Some of them may well have been wrong for him, and a few of them are wrong for anybody. But most of them never got six weeks, and that is not a question of character: nothing told him when the next one was due, and a thing with no next date runs on enthusiasm, which is a fuel that runs out.

Shine and softness report first, at about four to six weeks. Body takes longer than that. Anything tied to the cycle of the hair itself runs eight to twelve weeks and keeps going, and no oil shortens that, because nothing shortens it.

The judging is done well inside that. He does not post anything, he does not photograph anything and he does not explain himself. He writes to the support address on his order, and the money goes back to the card it came from. The bottle stays where it is, with whatever is left in it.

He has been promised things before.

Two who put it on the list

Nothing on that ledge is looked after because he feels strongly about it. It is looked after because it sits on a list with a number beside it, and the number comes round, and he does the thing without weighing it up first.

The last line has a card now. It names a material and it names ninety seconds, three to five times a week. The only part of it that was ever missing is the part that comes in the bottle.

A schedule that starts sometime is the one that never started. This one starts on the day the bottle arrives.