It's all about the HAIR

Let me say first, that I am very pleased to have hair. It is much much better than being bald, in every way. But why on earth has my hair grown back into a great curly unmanageable frizzball??? This isn't my hair, this is someone else's hair that has somehow come sprouting out of my head. How does that happen? Here is a close up of my hair as at this very second.

Here is what it looked like early last year. Any wave, any apparent bounce - it's carefully blowdried in. My hair is straight, straight straight.

My hair has always been straight. This is me in 1979 (looking off to the side, wearing the Centre bib). My hair was an awesome colour - which of course I hated, I wanted to be blonde like my Barbie - and dead straight.

And straight was fine in the 1970s (see the excellent selection of 70s cars in the background?) but in the 1980s I just wanted curls desperately. In 1987 - my last year of school - I got a spiral perm that was going to make me look like Rachel Hunter in the Trumpet commercial. It didn't make me a supermodel, but I finally had proper 80s big hair!! I thought I was the duck's nuts. I don't look particularly thrilled in the photo - this was my first ever job in a menswear shop for $4 an hour and, like many 17 year olds, I was not so struck on the concept of work.

But then I went off to university, and wore a lot more black, and tried to forget my pastel past, and get some smooth 90s hair. Long hair, worn with an alice band under a mistaken conviction that alice bands could be alternative if worn with tartan miniskirts and doc martens. Wrong, wrong again. This is the only photo I could find of 1990 where I don't look drunk or demented.

At the end of 1991, for no apparent reason, I got my short sleek bob spiral permed again. Why? Who knows? It looked awful. I went to a chinese hairdresser who couldn't understand what I wanted until light finally dawned and she said "linglets!! you want linglets!!!" It should have been a warning that no-one else was getting them done, and it was possibly not so fashionable. But it happened anyway. Here I am with my then boyfriend - his hair was naturally curly (which of course, he hated. I loved it, I thought it made him look vaguely disreputable and louche. Thank god I grew out of louche).

So, despite these forays into chemical curliness, I really do not know what to do with hair that comes out of your head frizzy. And it's driving me a bit mental. On the plus side, this trawl through the photo albums has been a giggle ... but it's hard finding a halfway decent headshot!!! Most of the photos look like the following ... hello 1992, you were a fun year, the bits I remember...