At the risk of sounding like a girl (but that’s ok; I am), I’m having an exceptionally good hair day today. It’s clean, shiny, and it’s doing what it’s supposed to, for a change, which can be basically surmised as “sit on my head and look fabulous”.

My hair is weird. Dark dark dark brown, dead straight and smooth and fine, and pretty long (to the middle of my back) but pretty much never worn loose (it gets in my way and annoys me), I’ve been growing if for ages, but I can’t remember why.

When I was younger, I always wanted to have long hair, but I didn’t. I didn’t brush it enough, and it wouldn’t stay in hairclips or ponytails or plaits - whenever I put ribbons or bands or bows in it, they just slid out, because my hair was so shiny and smooth and straight. And so, like so many others in the late seventies, I ended up with what was quaintly known at the time as a “page boy”.

“No,” I said to my mum, stamping my little foot on the pavement outside His’n'Hers on North Pole Road, “I don’t want a boy’s haircut”

But I got it anyway, for years and years and years.

And then, finally, I reached secondary school at eleven, and had a say in my hair. We went to the hairdresser (Klassy Kutz, on Barlby Road) and I gazed in rapture at the soft focus pictures on the wall, demonstrating the possible haircuts available. The mullet (think Kajagoogoo). The bouffant (think Barbra Dickson). The triangle head (think Elaine Paige). The city boy (think Tucker’s Luck). And then, my favourite. The one that shone out above all others.

The model had dark hair, which made a change, because at the time it was seen as very cool to be blonde, and so most models were. She had pierced ears, too (which I didn’t), displaying gold orbs which glowed in the soft light. Her skin was vaguely peach-coloured, and radiated strange luminescence - you could see this because she wore a fetching off-the-shoulder purple blouse (very 1980s), and she had a faraway look in her dark eyes. Her hair was sort of bouffant on top and short at the back and sides, and seemed to be big and bouncy and bold. I thought she was, in a word, gorgeous, and I vowed to have that haircut, or die (dye?) trying.

When he asked what I wanted doing, I didn’t say a word to Tony, the hairdresser, but pointed silently at the poster high on the wall, above the wall of mirrors. That one. I want that haircut. He did that thing, that comic double take, from my head to the model’s a few times, and then said “oh,” his mouth forming a perfect little moustachioed circle. “You want the Princess Di?”

Well, that just confirmed it. It was the mid eighties, and how could I possibly fail to have a haircut called after Her Royal Loveliness?

I nodded. Tony started to snip. Time passed.

Forty minutes later, I emerged from the salon, shell-shocked and hairsprayed to within an inch of my life. I had the Princess Di, oh yes. But where HRH looked divine and otherworldly, and the model in the poster looked sultry and beguiling, I looked like an eleven year old with a surprised hedgehog taped to my head.

See, in order to get my fine, straight hair to even vaguely do the bouffant standing-up thing, Tony had had to go at me with hairdryer and tongs and more hairspray than you might see at the average Miss World contest. My whole head felt sticky, and my hair was solid, like a helmet. If I’d leant against a wall, I’d have bounced off.

I caught glimpses of myself in shop windows as I passed, wandering home, stunned, and I couldn’t quite reconcile myself with the big-haired person reflecting at me. I patted it occasionally, which had no impact, and left sticky residue on my palms. This was not the glamourous result I’d been expecting.

Needless to say, lacking both hairdryer and hairspray at home, I was thankfully unable to recreate the look in my own bedroom. Instead, until the haircut gradually grew out (and it took forever, believe me), I ended up looking like a boy - and a boy with a bad haircut, to boot. Flat, uninteresting, badly shaped and definitely nothing like HRH. More like HRT, in fact.

So now I’ve got long hair. Long, boring, straight and not shaped, bouffanted or anything - a couple of layers here and there, but nothing like that Joan Franceton off the telly. Just there.

And now I remember why I’ve been growing it all this time - to get as far away as possible from looking like my eleven year old self. I think I might have just about managed it. Finally.

How’s your hair?