Thursday 3rd November

Is it just me, or are more middle-aged women wearing their hair longer these days. Not just those straggly haired eccentric old ladies who one suspects have very hairy legs and underarm hair, and refuse to wash and give off an aroma of a crustiness one normally associates with the homeless, but normal middle class women too.  I certainly seem to have noticed it more and more often; there was a time, of course when almost like clockwork, as women approached their mid-thirties they would start to wear it shorter.  Grandma always had fairly short hair, as far as I can remember; she used to have a woman in about once every six weeks. This travelling hairdresser, for want of a better term, would arrive by car, and would set herself up in the front sitting-room, or ‘drawing room’, as Grandma would poshly announce to visitors and tradesmen alike.  She would have a hairdryer on a stand, you know, one of those big conical ones you used to see in Salons everywhere, and a small suitcase full of large plastic bottles and literally hundreds of curlers. My mother and I knew to make ourselves scarce, my mother remaining in our large kitchen and I in my bedroom, for the duration.  Grandma and her hairdresser, whose name escapes me, if I ever knew it, would disappear up to the bathroom, where Grandma would have her hair washed, and then swaddled in a large fluffy towel they would descend to the ‘parlour’.  Grandma would emerge a couple of hours later with her hair neatly and ‘permanently’ curled, and sprayed with so much hairspray that it positively glistened.  As she grew older though, she stopped having ‘perms’ and would just have her hair cut and ‘set’, I think this actually suited her better, a looser more relaxed style, than the almost rigid and tight perm she wore in the fifties and sixties.  My mother has worn her hair in a boyish side-combed style since I can remember, I am not even sure where she used to go to get it cut; the travelling hairdresser was only ever for Grandma.

Shortly after I broke up with Adrian I got my hair cut, before this I used to wear it in a neat little bun, it was actually quite long, past shoulder length, but I always trimmed the ends before it got too long.  I have worn it short-ish ever since, once or twice toying with the idea of letting it ‘grow out’, but I could never get past that straggly in-between stage, so always gave in and had it styled again.  I am sure that I am far too old now to have long hair, though I think that the long and bouncy style favoured by some older women such as Jerry Hall has encouraged far more older women to try it.  I find it really quite disconcerting when you see a woman from the back who has a full and flowing head of hair, then they turn around and you almost gasp as you realise that what you naturally assumed was a thirty-something turns out to be approaching seventy, or even older; almost as weird as those men with wigs that make their hair look like a twenty year old with all the craggy wrinkles and myopic eyes of a pensioner; and you know that underneath this ridiculous appendage which is as precise and well combed as a mannequin’s the man is actually as bald as a coot.