I was talking to someone the other day who complained that she had “high maintenance hair.”

I replied that I don’t have that problem: I have high expectation hair.

See, the problem is, whenever I go to the hairdresser, intent on getting a new cut/style/colour, it never quite turns out how I imagined it would be, and I wind up disappointed - by my own hair.

Friends, that’s not a position you want to be in - let down by your own organic matter.

In my mind, I have adaptable, chameleon hair which will adapt easily, adopting new hues and styles at the flick of a hotbrush.

In reality, I have dead-straight silky-smooth fine hair which is notoriously difficult to tyle, difficult to colour, difficult to do anything with at all (except perhaps let it just sit there, which it does very nicely indeed.)

A couple of years or so ago, I found a decent hairdresser near where we were living in West Kensington. She came as a welcome relief to the mad Croat woman I’d been to before who insisted that I was naturally blonde, and wanted to take me back to my natural colour. Yeah, right. I was on the verge of pulling down my trousers to protest when happily, she moved back to Croatia and I was left without a stylist - but also, without a style.

So the new girl - a chirpy early-twentysomething with a good line in meaningless chatter and a lot of opinions about hair - insisted that while I wasn’t blonde and shouldn’t be, I should definitely entertain the possibility of a bit of red in my life, and in my hair.

Given that my most recent experiments with hair colour (a decade before) could be neatly surmised with the words “henna” and “bleach” (though not at the same time), and all in the context of my own bathroom, I was game for a try. After all, I couldn’t possibly end up looking as rubbish as I had done that time in the first year of university when I made the stupid mistake of visiting a hairdresser the morning after a breakup (me, not her) and asking for “something a bit different”.

I got that, alright. First bleaching and then slapping red dye onto my mid-back-length hair, I wound up looking like a matchstick. When one of my flatmates enquired whether I’d done it to match my bloodshot, cried-out eyes, I knew I’d made a mistake - though to be fair, the strong possibility had been percolating in my mind from the moment the stylist had whipped out that rear-view mirror and said “Alright?”

Not alright. At all.

So a decade on, when my new stylist asked if I wanted a little bit of red in amongst the brown, I said “sure.”

And it worked. Kind of. The trouble was, I’d been so timid about the colour disaster waiting to happen that I’d asked her to make it really subtle. It certainly was that. In fact, you could barely notice it at all. But still, it was my first sucessful (non-orange, non-stripy, non-matchstick) foray into colour, and I became braver as the months went by. The colour, not so much lowlights as interleaved shades, got gradually less subtle, while still avoiding the dreaded orange.

Two weeks before the wedding, in February this year, I went along to the salon for a touch-up. The stylist chattered incessantly about weddings - her sisters, her own, my upcoming. She made me swear on pain of death that I’d go to a salon in Newcastle the morning of the event and get my hair put up by a specialist. I tried to explain that it wasn’t that sort of wedding, but she was having none of it.

Somewhere in between the thrusting of bridal hair magazines into my hands and the popping out for a quick fag round the back, she left the colouring concoction on my hair too long. If not that, then the colour was mixed wrong. Or something. The net result was the same. Orange.

I think it’s safe to say that I freaked out. The stylist tried to be soothing, saying helpful things like “don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.” Tearily, I wailed that I was getting married in ten days and that I was going to be ginger, and that it was going to be very difficult to get used to that. She whisked me back to the sink for some toner treatment. Slightly less orange, but still belisha-esque. The salon owner came over and threw on a darker dye, while I sat in the chair, red eyed and sniffing. It was like the decade hadn’t even passed.

Eventually, they stopped with the dye - at my insistence, concerned about the whole lot falling out through overprocessing. They charged me for the full whack, the bastards, and I never went back.

At the wedding, my hair was put up (inexpertly, by me) and no-one noticed (or at least if they did, they were polite enough not to comment) that my hair had a curious russet shade about it. It didn’t spoil the day, though: nothing could have.

So after the dye disaster at the independent salon, I went to an upmarket chain on the recommendation of a friend (with great hair). I plonked down in the (leather) swivel chair, pointed at my bright noggin and said “please sort it out.”

Two hours later, I emerged with The Hair. The very hair shape and shade I’d always wanted. I was stunned. To be fair, that was mostly by the three-figure bill, but I figured it was worth it if only to have The Hair once in my life.

But that wasn’t to be. In fact, I’ve had The Hair for a good few months now, due to the magical hands of Gina and her army of stylish black-clad minions, all with pouts and hair at unusual angles. Nevertheless, they have worked miracles, and I have been happy.

Until last week.

I went along after work for the usual cut and colour, and had just sat down when a girl with great hair plonked down in the seat beside me, being finished off by her stylist. Her hair was, not to put too fine a point on it, fantastic. It was dark brown, like mine, and looked sunkissed and sexy without resembling anything you might see on a pop video. It was long, like mine, and it suited the hell out of her. So when Gina came over and said “the usual?” I pointed at the girl beside me and said “she’s got great hair.” Gina wasted no time at all in whisking up a bowl of caramel colour for the lowlights, and whacked it on, foil and all.

If I’d been thinking straight - in fact, if I’d been thinking at all - I’d have recalled that the last time I’d gone into a salon and pointed at someone else’s hair, and said “I want that,” it had been an unmitigated disaster and I’d ended up with a flat boyish mullet, when I should have looked like a brunette Princess Di. Admittedly, I was eleven, but these painful experiences stay with you.

And so it was that half an hour later, when Gina returned to remove the goo and foil from my hair, and once she had washed it off then wielded the hairdryer fiercely, I found myself to be the not-so-proud owner of what can only be described as a stripy head.

See, the thing with hair is that it’s different on every person. What suits one, doesn’t suit another. And what is physically possible on one person, will not happen on someone else. I was that someone else.

Because my hair is so fine and straight, the caramel chunks didn’t blend into the rest of the hair, making it seem sunkissed and sexy. They lay on top flatly, looking like a bird had crapped on my head, and fine trails of guano had trickled down past my ears.

There was an emergency consultation. Toner was added. Then the drier again. Then more toner. More drying. Eventually, after three hours in the salon, I went home, clutching onto Gina’s assurance that it would settle down in a day or so, and that if I still didn’t like it in a few days I could come back and they’d sort it out. I coughed up the usual three-figure sum, gulped, and found a taxi home.

I had forty-eight hours of being a semi-blonde, and I have to say, it didn’t suit me one little bit. Perhaps I was too self-conscious of the bird-crap blotchy chunks on my head. Perhaps I was hyperconscious of the contrast in colour between my dark brown natural hair and the caramel-yeah-right-I-don’t-think-so-unless-caramel-is-almost-green stripes. In any case, it didn’t settle down, and neither did I, despite the well-meaning positive noises made by husband and trusted friends that no, it wasn’t green and no, I didn’t look like a chav and no, it wasn’t dreadful. It just wasn’t very…me.

Finally, I caved in and called Gina. “Come in immediately,” she said, and I did. Two hours passed, and I emerged, relieved, with fruity dark hair.

Putting a blackberry colour over the whole lot has meant that the lighter bits are now deep red, and the normally darker bits are even darker - the colour, in fact, that I always wanted (but failed) to attain as a wanabee-goth as a teenager. It’s a little dark, admittedly, but anything’s better than the bird crap look. And it will settle down, I am assured.

Best of all? They did the correction (and new colour) for free. And while that’s not something you come to expect from a three-figure stylist, I suppose that’s what you’re paying for the rest of the time. The three-figure sum is insurance against your future impetuous stupidity.

I have learnt my lesson.