It was seeing an elderly woman struggle to keep her hair hidden under two hairnets and a thick woollen hat in the midday heat a couple of weeks ago that made me decide that my twenty eighth birthday would be a good time to finally call a truce in the ongoing and occasionally bloody feud between me and my hair.

It is not, you understand, that there's anything wrong with it per se. It does not even remotely resemble anything you might see in a glossy magazine, preferring instead to take its style cues from the stock footage of people falling insensible out of nightclubs at six in the morning that local news programmes use to illustrate scare stories on binge drinking, though if forced to choose between the two the latter is a much healthier look. It is merely that it will not bend to my iron will and this makes me cross, very cross. Every now and then I find myself beset with a brief but intense fit of pique and will cajole, plead and threaten, bribe with expensive serums and trips to unpronouncable salons but despite my best efforts at care and compromise it does its own thing anyway. If my hair were a man we'd long since have parted company and I'd probably have kept all his best CDs too, but the one time I tried to divorce myself of the problem once and for all and cut it all off, it hired an expensive lawyer and I ended up sentenced to two years of looking mental while it grew back.

I stopped dying it a few months ago after fifteen years, but was most disappointed to remember that my natural colour is not a deep, smouldering auburn with the reflection of a romantic caribbean sunset in every silky strand, or even the dark, bewitching espresso of a dusky foreign beauty who might take you into a shady alley down the side of the dusty bazaar and do unspeakably pleasant things to you, most of which you didn't even know existed; no. It is brown. Not hazelnut or mocha or bitter chocolate, just brown. Even brunette would be pushing it. In addition to this it is neither straight nor curly, but in defiance of the best electro-chemical methods out there to make it conform to one or the other, points in seventeen different directions at once. It is true that a hairdresser did once manage to make it all face the same way, but that only lasted as long as it took me to get home on the bus whereapon I looked in the mirror and saw a woman on the Trisha show waiting for the paternity results of her quintuplets looking back at me. I resolved to spend the cash on alcohol in future.

Nonetheless I like to think my hair and I are inching towards some kind of better understanding. I will wash it and leave it to its own devices in return for...well, nothing much yet. But I'm hoping that one day it might find itself well enough disposed towards me that it might have a word with my ankes about co-operating with these magnificently tall red glitter heels I have...