JMorgan

Last updated 01:00, Thursday, 23 August 2007

WANDERING through bookshops looking for holiday novels, I noticed there was a huge number of bonding books about fathers and sons.

Men, apparently, don’t like to discuss feelings and emotions, but are quite happy to talk endlessly about hobbies (especially sport) to connect with each other.

I don’t think it works quite the same way with women. My mother and I aren’t afraid to say what we think and are always happy to offer our opinions to each other – whether the other wants to hear them or not.

We’ve never had any long emotionally-charged silences because neither of us can stop talking for any length of time to feel uncomfortable with each other.

While my mother and I may not agree on a whole load of subjects, the one thing that has always joined us has been our obsession with hair.

My mother is a hairdresser and most of my early child-hood memories feature those huge old-fashioned hair-dryers, boxes of multi-coloured curlers in the kitchen and the smell of ammonia wafting through the house when she was perming the hair of friends and sisters in the dining room.

My dad would always keep out of the way because he knew that hair was women’s business and my mother’s kitchen was a little haven to those who wanted to ease the stresses of life with a gossip and a blow-dry.

She and I may have some humdinger arguments over the years about the colour of my hair (she hated my jet- black Cleopatra look) but we have never, ever, disagreed about the importance of hair to women.

I’ve never learned any practical skills from my mother over the years, but I can look at someone’s hair and know exactly how to knock ten years off them, simply by changing their cut or colour.

I am truly phobic about greasy hair, find it impossible not to check out a person’s hair the very first time I meet them and have been known to stop women in the street to tell them their hair looks fabulous. This is my mother’s doing.

Talking about hair is incredibly relaxing to us. My mother and I will ring each other up to tell each other about a great new style we have seen in a magazine, we spend ages chatting about why someone looks fabulous with short hair or the state of men and their comb-overs.

She is the first person I ring while watching the make-up shows to scream “Look at the hair’’ and if I need to draw her attention to someone in the street, I whisper “the one with the hair’’ and she instantly finds them.

My mother has also passed on this obsession to my sons who have always had their hair cut by her and who now spend more time in the mirror applying styling products than I do.

Where my family is concerned, to misquote Bill Shankly, hair is not just a matter of life and death, its more important than that.