hair

My hairdresser has left the salon.  Again.  I rang up last week to make an appointment, and was told that she didn't work there any more, as of about a month ago, which will be around the time she rang in sick the previous time I went for a haircut.  At the thought of having to wait while yet another new person got used to cutting my hair my heart sank right to my wellington boots.

It is not easy hair to cut.  Nobody likes having to switch stylists, and probably every woman believes that her hair is special and uniquely challenging.  Too thick, too thin, fine, flyaway, frizzy, whatever.  Mine is an absolute pig, or a challenge if you prefer modern encouraging management terminology, thick, curly, growing in odd directions, changing texture over different parts of my scalp, with a hairline at the back that one hairdresser described with candid brutality as 'dodgy'.

The last haircut, done by the emergency substitute, grew out jolly badly, becoming shapeless and clumpy within three weeks of my leaving the salon.  I was afraid at the time that she hadn't taken enough off, and hadn't thinned it.  Strange little curls of hair sprung up at the nape of my neck almost instantly, like a drake's tail, and stuck out to the side so that you could see them from the front, while the top leaped upwards into an approximation of Dilbert's pointy headed boss.  It didn't seem obvious whether the bits at the side in front of my ears were meant to go over or under the arms of my glasses, but they didn't seem to want to do either.  The only possible basis on which to cut my hair successfully is to work out what it wants to do, and go with it.  Styling and curling tongs don't hold it for more than ten minutes, even if I were prepared to spend any time on either, and were not given to walking around in the rain, which makes it curl, and cramming a hat on my head the instant it gets either cold or sunny, which between them cover most of the year in the UK.

The girl who answered the telephone, after she had broken the bad news about my vanishing stylist, asked when I wanted to come in.  I tried to explain that the game had changed if I had to switch hairdressers, and that it was not a question of when I wanted an appointment so much as who was going to cut my hair, who would be any good at it and enjoy doing it and not send me out into the world in latent Dilbert meets Donald Duck mode.  We settled on a senior stylist who had curly hair herself and understood the issues.  I wrote the appointment in my diary with a sense of foreboding.

I need not have worried.  Or at least I think I need not have worried.  I'll only know how good she was in a month's time, when I see whether I already have a chrysanthemum on my head, or still look quite presentable.  In truth her curly hair was not very like mine used to be at her age, being more of the silky and corkscrew variety, but she is half Italian, whereas mine is a cocktail of Welsh borders, scouser and shtetl, and considerably wirier.  However she has been cutting hair for nineteen years and sounds as though she knows her stuff, and she certainly spent some time looking at how it grew, asked me what I wanted, explained to me what she was going to do, and why it hadn't grown out at all well last time.  I love my experts to sound expert.  Being on my fourth stylist in about eight years, plus the ones who've had to fill in for staff sickness, I have got more determined about stating what I want, and can now request with a straight face a pixie cut that's a cross between Carey Mulligan and Dame Judi Dench.  As I told her, I have visible cheekbones and still only one chin, so I might as well make the most of them while they last.

Meanwhile I detect a few more rumblings from women challenging the tyranny of the dye bottle. Good on you, sisters.  I do not dye my hair, which is moving from salt and pepper to iron grey, and if I make it to my seventies will be brilliant pure white, if my father's is anything to go by.  I am too mean to pay, and too busy and disorganised to visit the salon, to have the roots retouched every two or at a maximum three weeks.  I think that visible white roots with coloured hair look absolutely terrible.  I think that flat home dyes look absolutely terrible.  I don't know what colour to dye it.  Dark hair with middle aged skin looks positively Morticia Adams, while funky colours scream insecurity.  I am middle aged but I'm a fun person.  Henna would make me look like a mafia wife with my sallow skin, and blonde would just look plain weird.

Plus I think that hair dye is probably bad for you.  Cancer patients are barred from colouring their hair after treatment, and if something is too toxic for someone who has had chemotherapy to use it at all, why would a healthy person risk using it, unless they had to?  A friend of mine has just had a very nasty allergic reaction to hair dye, which started when she had an expensive permanent colour instead of her usual semi-permanent, for her daughter's wedding.  It was such a generalised reaction, it took her and her GP six months to even work out that it was the hair dye making her ill.

Anyway, men aren't expected to dye their hair.  The chosen one, Jose Mourhino, has been all over the papers with his iron grey hair, and he is generally considered a very attractive man.  Actually, he is a good looking man, apart from the fact that he so clearly knows it.  Paul Hollywood, heart-throb.  I don't see it myself, but a friend of mine informs me that his wife, just fifty, wishes he had hair like that.  I'd have thought it was more diplomatic not to tell your spouse you wish they had somebody else's hair, but there you go.  Goerge Clooney, mega heart throb who puts the baker in the shade.  Gary Lineker.  I'm not sure about Lineker's heart throb status, but he's on the telly.

So come on, ladies, and take the chaps on at their own game.  Save yourself hundreds of pounds annually (I work it out at £1,040 if you go every three weeks at sixty quid a pop) and almost as many hours of your life.  Why run the risk of chemically induced tiredness, itchiness and abscesses? And who do you think you're kidding anyway?  Be bold, confident, natural and authentic.  You know it makes sense.