My little bit of homely advice this week I offer completely free is - if you decide that because it's spring and everything is bright and new and full of the joys of burgeoning life it might be better to decide to dye your hair a different colour before 11pm on a Sunday night.

Then you won't wake up bleary eyed on a Monday morning and find a mad-eyed woman staring out at you from the bathroom mirror with hair the approximate colour of a slightly overdone gingernut biscuit.

I shouldn't be using the word 'dye' really, because nowadays we ladies don't dye, we colour, tint, highlight or brighten. Whatever, I did it, and I'm not entirely sure if I like it.

I should have realised that something was slightly amiss when I met my grandson on the way to the bathroom and he stopped dead in his little tracks and did a double take.

He usually ignores me first thing, they learn early that Nanny doesn't talk to human beings before she's had her first cuppa and a ciggie.

I've got used to the double takes now, I'm grateful for the compliments and I've ignored remarks about using me as a beacon to guide ships up the Tamar. It's just one further step in my love hate relationship with my hair.

My mother always blamed my hair on my father's side of the family. Have you ever noticed that parents tend to blame the less than satisfactory bits of their children on each other? 'He's got his grandmother's nose but fortunately he's got my hands and skin', they say.

My father's side of the family apparently all had dead straight very fine hair which would brook no interference from hair ribbons, slides or grips. Which was not a problem in his family because all the children were boys and such things were frowned on in those days.

School

My hair, on the other hand, was the same and no matter how firmly my mother pinned it back when I went to school, I always arrived home without said grips, slides or ribbons and undone plaits, which adorned various bushes and hedgerows along the route to school.

I wasn't interested in hair styles until I was about12 and , along with every other girl, wanted flowing wavy locks.

We all discovered how to do pin curls and used to pin our hair up on the train in the morning, cover it with a headscarf and then brush it out at school.

For two or three glorious moments I had wavy locks, then it used to drop back out again and stay straight. A year or so later I spent my pocket money on a small packet of dye, which promised golden shining hair which would look entirely natural.

Horror

Carried away with this, I left the dye on twice as long as it said to get a deeper richer colour. What I got was carrot coloured hair, and not a very even carrot either, and a mother who shrieked with horror and kept me away from school the next day while she applied a further dye to cover it up.

Next, I pleaded for a perm, which would I was sure produce soft curls. Unfortunately, my mother took me to a Mr Sydney, who's one and only style had, and still has, been immortalised by the Queen Mother but which didn't look too good on a 14 year old.

After a tortuous session in the salon I emerged with tight little sausages adorning my red scalp. Worse was to come when it was washed, and the little sausages shot skywards and refused to lie down. In those days when you had a perm you had to keep returning to the salon to get them to beat it into submission on a regular basis.

Over the intervening forty odd years I've struggled to come to terms with my hair. I've had arguments with hairdressers the length and breadth of the country.

No, it won't backcomb, it looks like a something being prepared for bird's nest soup. No, you can't blow-dry it, not unless you want to beat it back with a cat' o' nine tails. No, it won't stay up in a neat chignon unless you use half a ton of lacquer on it.

Once I stupidly remarked that I longed for hair you could just shake dry after washing and ended up with a tiny curl perm which everyone said made me look like Jimmy Hendrix (when I say everyone I mean my two daughters who said it out loud, everyone else just thought it).

Confidence

One crimper destroyed any confidence I had for months by remarking that anyone with a nose the size of mine needed to balance it with hair which puffed out at the sides. Small comfort leaving the salon with a fashionably square head if you had a nose like Pinocchio. And yet I still left a tip . . .

And then there are the rampant scissors, wielded by someone who is incapable of understanding the words 'just a little off the ends please' and proceeds to lop two inches off one side before you can get him or her in a neck lock. And if you say you don't want a cut you suddenly find your are suffering from the highly infectious hair disease known as 'split ends', which is your case is rampantly running up each individual hair and has nearly reached your scalp.

And we won't even mention the hairdresser who made me look like a cottage loaf for my wedding day, a style which instantly turned into a floor mop when the lacquer wore off. Or the one who produced an asymetrical style on my fringe, crimper speak for 'I'm incapable of cutting in a straight line'.

I have to say, in fairness, that in the past few years it has been gratifying to find a local hairdresser who actually listens to me, believes me when I say blow drying is not an option and has, to date, managed not to insult my nose.

The rampant red, however, is my mistake. It looked good on the packet, a subtly rich coppery russet. I blame the lighting in Boots.