After years of experimentation, women usually find their perfect hairstyle by the age of 32. We will have tried around 50 styles by then, according to the study by hair transplant firm, Crown Clinic.

I’ve probably exceeded that, having tried everything, from long and straight, to short and layered. My hair has been bobbed, teased, twisted and challenged by evil smelling perms and highlighting bleaches.

As a child my mum took me to Lewis’s, a department store in Birmingham, where I sat on a toy animal to have my hair cut. I didn’t like it, because they practised singeing to get rid of split ends, something that is apparently becoming fashionable again. I still remember the lighting of tapers and the acrid scent of burning hair – it made the experience more like a visit to the dentist.

Later, I was rollered and stuffed under a Dalek hair dryer, so thank goodness for Vidal Sassoon’s sleek manes and the introduction of blow-drying. Straighteners now keep our manes poker straight, while other gadgets – including rollers which are making a comeback – curl us up again.

Mr F, who had a black Beatle mop when I met him, jokes that hair is my hobby. Well, yes, why not? You can be creative with it and it’s more fun than a pottery class.

I began life with brown hair, but it has been rinsed, dyed and hennaed over the years in various shades, from a purply-raven to vivid reds.

I raised the most eyebrows when I announced loudly that I was having ‘a Brazilian’. However, this was not the more intimate procedure, but a hair treatment which is now banned by most hairdressers because of awful side effects from (what turned out to be) embalming fluid.

Our tresses are a serious business, and Mr F has strict ‘hair instructions’ which he has promised to follow to the letter. If I’m ever in a coma, he is to make absolutely sure I get my roots done.

I HAVEN’T lived in Birmingham for 40 years but I have a fondness for my home town where I was born, went to school and grew up. We were there at the weekend visiting friends and I’m not splitting hairs when I say it is definitely not a no-go area – to anyone.

Not even Mr F, who’s from west London!