Since the day I stepped out of the salon, my supposedly artfully tousled bob has never looked the same two days in a row. Neither has it ever looked like it did when the hairdresser did it.

In fact, the image I saw in the salon mirror is now such a distant one, I can't remember what I'm meant to be striving for. No amount of "product" produces. Root-boosters and thickening sprays make my hair feel like boiled jumpers. Which makes my teeth itch.

Serums and waxes, intended to define the layers, make my hair go silky soft for a few seconds, then it hangs around like a sulky, greasy teenager defying everything you demand of it.

And oh, the technique I have tried and failed with.
Normally I give a good blowdry. My technique involves a hairdryer resembling a 747 jet engine and one of those big, round roller brushes and I had perfected the art out of absolute necessity.

You see, I have the type of hair most people only ever have when they are born and when they die. It is thin, pathetic wispy stuff. On my wedding morning, stylist Michael, painstakingly attempting to turn it into something high and artful with the addition of something he must have had chopped off a palomino, told me so in no uncertain terms which didn't exactly do wonders for my nerves.

But it doesn't work on this style. That first blowdry, I actually thought it had. I bounced into Bloke, who was busying himself in the bathroom with his own "product" - a tub of styling cream I'd secretly tried and discarded because it gave me that Something About Mary look. He looked at me in a way I have started to recognise as an attempt to feign disapproval.

Which drives me mad.

"I think I've managed it," I beamed, flicking the almost flicky bits to and fro like a girl in a shampoo commercial.

He looked at me, then back to his reflection in the mirror which clearly was far preferable..

"Do you remember Butterflies?" he said.

I knew instantly he didn't mean that lingerie shop on Ecclesall Road.
He was talking Wendy Craig sit-com. Helmet hair.

"And stop doing that thing with your head. It's what the dog does when I bring him in from the rain," he scoffed.

"Not that you'd know because you never walk him in the rain. Or in the shine, come to think of it."

I was more indignant about the hair comment than the pet neglect accusation. Until I checked in the mirror.

Sure enough, between the bedroom and the bathroom, the hair do I thought I'd done had become undone.

It had morphed into pageboy - the style so-called because it was perfect for callow medieval youths who didn't know they were worth anything better. And anyway, it slotted perfectly under their iron helmets.

Ah, the pageboy ... the style someone sensible decided my gran needed when she got Parkinson's. Which was remarkably similar to the cut foisted on me at 11 for very similar reasons.

She was too old to argue against practicality over something frivolous that brought out her cheekbones, and I was too young to kick up a fuss about being taken to a men's hairdresser because it was cheaper.

Since the Wendy Craig insult I have struggled, nay battled valiantly, with all manner of heated implements to turn flatness into bouncy layers. But to no avail. It's as if your hair has a memory. It craves familiarity. All it wants to do is go back to what it knows. Its roots.
Straighteners didn't work. Ok, I couldn't make them work because I am not of that generation; I'm pre GHD.

So I have resorted to the solution that has got me through many a hair crisis; curls.

I have fished from the cellar the ancient set of heated rollers that enabled me to do the Seventies New Romantic mullet, my Bucks Fizz look and Eighties Victoria Principle.

Thankfully they're still working perfectly.

I'm told long, glamorous curls are big this winter, so now all I have to do is grow it back to the length it was a month ago.