Barnet Fair

I have long suspected that there is something fundamentally wrong with my hair, but lately I am beginning to wonder whether it is actually evil, or at the very least, malicious.

It is wilful and stubborn and in all my long years of having my hair cut every month in some sort of attempt to show it who is boss, no one has ever managed to tame it. I would have loved the next sentence to be, 'until now', but this isn't Oprah. At the slightest provocation, like, say walking away from the mirror, my hair reverts into its usual joke; the nun. It lies down flat and refuses to play. One of its other jokes, although I haven't seen this one for a while, is to turn my hair into something so bouffant, if you look quickly, I look like Melvyn Bragg. My hair (as is my genetic predisposition) grows very fast, and I have loads and loads of it. Masses of the stuff, and every inch is ill tempered and malevolent. It chose to turn itself grey when I was sixteen, and refuses to be dyed unless it can turn random patches bright red, even if I am dying it brown.

Normally, I laugh in its face and get on with it, but I have begun to notice lately that my hair is forcing my poor unsuspecting hairdressers to cut themselves. It was only when the last two haircuts resulted in bloodshed that I remembered this actually happens with alarming regularity. Not only do these people get injured, I swear that as soon as one hair is cut, it grows back immediately. Today I turned a lovely smiley girl into an exhausted, perplexed, shadow of her former self. She just couldn't understand why it still looked exactly the same. The time before last, from start to finish, my 'trim' took two and a half hours. The hairdresser had much more stamina and refused to give up, despite the fact that all I cared about at this stage was my lunch. My hair took it upon itself to grow back into the same mess a mere week later.

On the way back from the hairdresser this afternoon, a man selling the Big Issue equivalent (Street Sheet I think it is called) told me that I had pretty hair. I said thank you, then he said, awkwardly now, thinking that he may well have offended me 'well all of you is pretty too'. I stopped and laughed out loud in the street like Brian Blessed and continued on my journey without pausing to look back. I think my hair is planning something, and I don't want anyone else to get hurt.