My life in highlights

I wouldn't class myself as high-maintenance, but, very slowly, I'm learning that this may not be A Good Thing, especially as it's largely down to ignorance, as opposed to a lack of vanity.

I suppose women learn how to Take Care of Themselves - in a plucking, squeezing, de-scrofulating sort of way - from their mothers. And if that mother moves 12,000 miles away when you're, say, 15 - about the same time a girl begins to understand the powerful alchemy on sale at the Miss Selfridge 'Kiss and Make-up' counter - then a lot of that feminine maintenance business is going to be learnt on the hoof. Very much so in my (semi-cloven, in-urgent-need-of-a-pedi) case.

Stuck in that 26-year-old beauty timewarp, then, I find I still buy Mum's Oil of Olay (Ulay as was), even though I need something that moisturises with the strength of a hundred fire engine hoses aimed at a burning skyscraper.

Nonetheless, Olay reminds me of a time of dermatological innocence, before lines, Botox, Restylane or disillusion set in - a time when I trusted that mothers knew best about, well, everything really.

Whatever. The point is that my own adult beauty journey has been haphazard, careless, gleaned in part from glossy magazines, in pieces from friends, occasionally by glancing inside other people's shopping trolleys. And the majority of my closest girlfriends have been pretty low-maintenance too, which explains why I was in my thirties before I got around to exfoliating. (And, believe me, that's about a decade too late.)

But given this flagrant disregard for the kind of bodily maintenance Celebrity Big Brother winner Chantelle has probably taken for granted since she first snagged her shin on a Bic, it's quite surprising that I have always been fussy and proprietorial about maintaining my hair. In my teens, of course, this was a choice; in my forties it's a necessity.

Follicularly speaking, I have been there, done that, bought the T-shirt... and then ripped it up into little rags to tie and twizzle around those squishy rubber Molton Brown things, circa 1982. I have Crimped (1977-8), Crazy-Colored (1979-82), bleached (on and off from 1982-86), permed (madly, as late as 1987), mohicanned, dreadlocked, extended (1980-84 inclusive) and, perhaps most surprisingly, allowed it to grow halfway down my back while leaving it to its own natural colour devices (1989-91).

I've obviously got it very wrong - the perm, the bleach, the zebrastriped Mohawk with blonde extensions - but, very occasionally, also very right (Sept, 2005). Statistically this was inevitable at some point, if only because I've just never stopped messing around with it.

I am not blessed with head-turning I-just-walked-out-of-the-salon hair - even when I've just walked out of the salon. It is not and never has been my crowning glory, but it has been versatile enough to express various aspects of my mood and personality at different stages of my life.

Eventually, however, a woman grows up and recognises that her personality isn't something she needs (or wants) to shout about any more, and by the time she can hold her own in a boardroom, round a dinner table or in a roomful of small children she probably doesn't have to let her hair do the talking.

Not that hair stops being an outward manifestation of the inner woman - merely that the signifiers become more subtle: sayonara shaven sides and dreadlocked mohican, hello pricey highlights.

After I'd been married and divorced and then bred and hit 40, I wondered whether I shouldn't just forget about having the kind of long lustrous locks that are, theoretically at least, capable of waking up tousled and bed-headed in a sexy way, rather than in an Ijust-couldn't-be-botheredto-dry-it kind of way.

With the onset of middle-age, there is a great deal of unsisterly judgment of women who choose to make highly visible outward displays of their relative youth and sexuality. 'Mutton as lamb...' other women will mutter of those who seek (and probably get) wolf-whistles during their hot-flush years.

I've done it myself - tut-tutted over Jerry Hall's trademark blonde mane, for example, which is presumably as alluring to the opposite sex as it ever was, even if I happen to think that it ages her. And, unlike Jerry (and aside from the Olay habit), I'm not stuck in 1979, so, like many women in their forties, I have neither-one-length-nor-the-other, won't-scare-the-horses hair - either short-long or long-short but also springy and schwingy and shiny and 'lighted enough for me to let it all hang out with a minimum of product when I wanna Feel Like A Natural Woman'.

And I really can't thank Susan and Joel at John Frieda enough for creating that brilliant illusion - even if most of the time it remains clipped up in a twist at the back. Otherwise I'd just chew the ends distractedly while sitting in front of the Mac. Not that that matters much, either, because I can go for days without setting foot any further than the end of the road.

And it's not as if the end of my road is in London W1, either. These days, I commute from Sussex primarily to see Susan and Joel, who have been in charge of what happens on the top of my head (and therefore occasionally inside it, too) since 1998 - the point when I finally stopped being a control freak (if only hair-wise) because I knew I'd found people I could trust to make me look - and indeed feel - better than I ever imagined. Some women swear that a great cut and colour is better than sex. I totally disagree - it is better - well, OK, certainly more useful - than sex and therapy combined.

Anyway, my predilection for regular serious hair-jobs is one which sounds suspiciously vain and high maintenance, for which I make no apologies. I can live with my conscience - but, hey, maybe I don't have to live with these toenails. Now that would be grown-up.